House Blind?

As I’ve mentioned, my sister and her husband are coming to visit this week (hooray!) They’re not staying with us, but they’ll be at our house quite a bit, and this caused some frantic cleaning over the weekend. Sunday my husband was lounging on the couch, finishing his coffee, when I announced “It’s time for the Father’s Day cleaning party to begin!”  WHAT?  He wasn’t too thrilled about that, but I promised him the next few days would be filled with fun, booze, great food, and celebrations.  Sunday, we had to clean. Sigh.  We’re just not great about the house.  We’re the type of people who can walk right past a mess and not even notice it.  It’s not until someone is coming to visit that we suddenly snap to attention and see everything that’s gone wrong.  Then when we do clean, we’re pretty terrible at it Obviously we had to vacuum.  As we were doing this, we noticed that the vacuum had hardly any suction.  Oh GREAT!  Perfect time for the vacuum to break!  Finally, my son suggested that maybe something was stuck in there?  Sure enough- it turned out there was a sock stuck in the hose.  This was after we had done a totally half-assed job of semi-vacuuming the entire house. We took six huge bags of clothes, shoes and books to Goodwill, and threw out several more huge bags of trash.  My husband pressure-cleaned the patio (what a fun thing to do on Father’s Day!) and we mopped.  Great, now the house is clean.  But we had to deal with the fact that we had several blank walls, making the house look totally un-homey. This is something that bothers me peripherally on and off.  I WANT to have things hanging on the walls, but I just don’t know what would look good.  Every once in a while I’ll make an effort, but then I don’t know what to hang or how to hang it (I mean, if it’s heavy you need some sort of an anchor… right?) The first thing was obvious.  We have a painting my brother-in-law (the one who’s coming to visit) actually painted!  It was hanging in our bedroom for a long time, until I painted that room and then I never put it back up (that was four years ago.) We rallied ourselves and put it up in the living room.  It looks GREAT!  But that left the rest of that wall looking weirdly blank. I can’t even believe my family let me attempt this, but I put together a sort of “gallery wall” (that’s what it’s called, right?) Once I got started, it wasn’t even that hard (did you know you can use Command strips to hang things???  Just kidding… I’m sure everyone knows that.) Here’s the end result: The big day arrived, and their flight actually landed EARLY.  My sister texted that they were on their way, and it was like the scene from Risky Business where the parents are on their way home from the airport, and the guys are rushing around frantically trying to put the house together.  We re-vacuumed, dusted, threw a bunch of clutter into a box to be dealt with later (or, never seen again), lit a candle, and were ready to collapse in a heap, ER I MEAN,  greet our guests! Is anyone else phenomenally bad at decorating?  If the answer is no, can you come to my house and help me???