I love the buttery yellow! Accent with pillows, throwns, rugs in burgandy. Mix solid w/prints. Hang family pics in inexpensive black frames. Shop thrift stores for all these items. Spray paint can work wonders! You can paint lamps, pic frames, etc. You should find a large pic for over your sofa or you could hang a group of pics up there. Over the fireplace replace the mirror with a pic, rod iron piece or a wreath. I use old hardback books. I stack 3 or 4 books and sit knik knacks on them. Very inexpensive. Hang a shelf up high and display items. It will make the room seem warmer. Nice window treaments would really help also. Use your imagination…watch HGTV and check out HGTV.com. Lots of great cheap ideas. You can work wonders with $250. I wish I lived near; I love to decorate. It is a challenge for me….my relaxation. Good luck!

I say being, for if I WERE to say life I would be MISLEADING YOU/LYING. I am not alive, though I still walk the earth and will continue to do so for the rest of time itself.I am plagued with immortality, never able to live side by side with mortal beings in my current state. Though after each LIFE I AM BIDDEN TO TAKE, I regain for a short period of time, a human face and human flesh. My old self WAS ripped from my grasp as a foolish young man upon making a pact with the devil, an irreversible promise which I’d jumped on with no thought of consequence; (SEMI-COLON) the promise of immortality.Now as I LEAP from rooftop to iron wrought terrace, wrapped in the night’s fog and concealed in hooded robes to hide my gleaming white bones, I alighted upon a small bed of roses.I did not crush each that WHICH I HAD stepped upon – a bit clumsy.I DID NOT CRUSH THEM, no. I was extremely light, FOR even when I jump my descent, aided by my robes, is far slower than a human’s. Each rose I passed beside wilted and curled turning black with even a slightest touch on my bone.I could tell the door WAS locked, and leaning down I exhaled a misted breath to the keyhole, turning the tumblers in the gilded handle of the French doors.Slowly, silently I turned that beautiful gilded handle, and so quietly did I enter that I DID not even STIR her from her silent reading. Pooled light from the oil lamp shimmering on her ashen curls.Only when I stepped OFF the floral throw rug did I make a sound. The bones of my foot HIT the burnished wooden floor, tinkling as if made of HOLLOW glass against the exposed wood. She looked up from her reading. DESPITE MYSELF I grimaced at the sound.“Who-” and that was all she said, for by that time I had lowered my hood and pulled one bony finger up to where my lips would have been, had I skin.She stared at me, stunned, as I slowly made my way across the floor, bone against wood sounding clear as a silver bell in the cool, misted autumn night.The sound seeming to frighten her most, as SHE REALISED I WAS not just a figment of her mind, but truly here to take her.My hands moved to her cheeks; holding her they possessed a strength … I lent down to the level of her wrinkled face, her undulating, disheveled hair HAD fallen in her eyes.A foot from her mouth – ( lol – unintentionally funny line – sounds like her foot is being extracted from her mouth. It reads better without that line)I pulled her soul out from her core. Between her teeth it slipped from her and into my bone. It seeped INSIDE to renew me and reattach flesh to my bones.I dropped her body and left it lying on the couch with its only purpose now to be a rotting shell in the earth. (no capital).Her eyes were now closed and her face peaceful as I stood gazing over her, contemplating why I had been told to take HER, IN PERFECT HEALTH, and how long my human façade would hold.With my hood still down I turned, my human face HAD NOT YET BEGUN TO RETURN. Behind me stood a young girl of no more than ten years in age with auburn TRESSES (auburn hair sounds less 17th century), her eyes wide and her lips parted, her round cheeks flushed.“I saw you come from the garden, but… the door… it was locked, and my mother- is she…?”“Yes, she is gone,” I walked towards her, my feet ringing on the floor. When I reached her she shut her eyes tight as if the action would ward me off.Normally I would have been gone far before now but there was something about this young girl which was almost enticing. – Clumsy sentence. Try – ‘By this time I should have been far away, but there was something about this girl etc…. ‘)Good story! Would work well as a short story if you end it in the next paragraph or two. Best of luck with it.