My dear pal, David Staskowski, shared this smart ‘use what you have’ pot rack idea. You remember David, don’t you? He was the clever ‘Ask David’ columnist from the late, great magazine, Metropolitan Home.

Plus, here’s a suggestion for storing your pot lids from my book, Downsizing Your Home With Style:

Hang your lids over the pot handles to keep them together and save space.

When you write how-to books (in my case decorating how-to books), you never know who you’ve helped unless the readers contact you or you happen to meet somewhere. Yesterday, as I read an article in the New York Times, I was surprised to learn that the subject of the story had used my first book, Use What You Have Decorating, to help her after the attacks on September 11, 2001 and life-changes found her in a new home in lower Manhattan.

Here’s her story.

One of the things I love most about being an interior redecorator is having the chance to meet so many people and hear their life stories and, even, love stories.

Last week I worked with a client who had first called my firm in the early 1980s (she’d worked with one of our senior designers a couple of times; this was the first time she and I had met).

She told me how she and her present husband knew each other since childhood because their families were close friends and how he had taken her to her senior prom. Although there was a strong attraction between them, he was swept away by another woman, a dancer, whom he’d later married. She had also married and had children; yet they stayed in touch because of their parents.

Years later, with their respective children grown, they each left unhappy marriages and became a couple again. This time he realized that the sweet woman who was devoted to her family and loved to knit was, and had always been, the perfect girl for him. He wrote a beautiful and touching poem for her, declaring his true and undying love and he married her in New York on September 12, 2001, even though many of their guests were unable to fly in for their small wedding.

Last week, she showed me the black and white photo of the two of them taken at her senior prom. In it, a young man in a tuxedo is standing behind a young woman in a strapless gown who is wearing a wristlet corsage.

My client and I hung that photo in their bedroom, just an inch above her husband’s framed poem. Some things and some people just belong together.

I love lists. I make a list every night before going to bed so I can sleep better. It really helps.

The List Producer blog has posted my 10 Most Common Decorating Mistakes, in case you need a reminder and want to fix up your home in hours, without spending any money. Check it out:

http://www.listproducer.com/2011/10/20/10-most-common-decorating-mistakes/