I cleared the table in breezehome, placed a map and several items on the table, then returned days later to find everything on the table returned and my placed items scattered on the floor...what gives?
In OB i left items in every home i owned and they were in the exact place i left them (occasionally display cases weren't)
So my question is can we places items in our homes or will they always reset and get scattered? What about placing items in abandoned shacks? I'm hoping to make them my home away from home

This happens the first time you place new items in a house, once you pick them all up and re-place them they should stay next time you enter. Annoying i know.

Yup, that's the improved Skyrim giving the people what they wanted.

In OB stuff never got reset, once knocked everything off a table it stayed that way. Skyrim resets things. You have places where there aren't other things to decorate

Book shelves are a step in the right direction, but other things need to be as simple as they are. Like shelves for items and tables n such.

I thought bookshelves were an improvement indeed; Skyrim did improve many mechanics and simple flaws.

If only there was one single house with enough bookshelves, and if only most of them werent bugged.

No, this is most certainly not an 'improvement'.
In Morrowind, I could decorate. This was a feature enjoyed by such a lot of people that it was not uncommon to find galleries full of screenshots of what people did with their houses.
That there were lightsources you could move around only enhanced that.

Oblivion?
No more candles or lanterns to highlight something. Every little thing had its own physics and pushed everything else out of its way. It was a nightmare.

Skyrim?
Completely impossible. Clutter respawns, the physics is so ramped up that items literally launch themselves and there is no way to position items.

Absolutely unfathomable that this was put in the game the way it was, considering how big decorating was for a lot of people.
But thats indicative of Skyrim as a whole I suppose. Unfinished, rushed, bare-bones and a boatload of popular features gone without any reason.

In Oblivion I had daedric artifacts sink through the floor never to return. In Skyrim, stuff gets reset a lot of the time but not always. I hope at least it won't disappear.

As for Morrowind, my Telvanni house was full of all kinds of stuff in a glorious explosion of junk. Eventually I modded a door that opened at a vendor just to sell some of it. But still it was kind of cool, though it took a long time to get there. And you had to levitate just to get around the place. Good times.

I think this went into the "too hard basket" as Australians would say.

They can hit a happy medium with manipulating objects. I don't know why they went with the implementation they used in Skyrim. It seems that they didn't ever actually try to arrange things in a certain way

In OB, where you picked an object up mattered. In Skyrim, it is manipulated by a balance point and it makes things like decorating quite impossible

I think the Markarth house is the best for storage and it also has a big set of bookshelves. I find that one and the Whiterun house the most liveable. The Solitude one was the most dissapointing.

You just have to keep redoing it. Drop all the things you want to place on the floor near where you want them. Go out and come back in and note the ones that have moved. Move them again, then go out and come in and see if they've moved again. If they haven't then it's safe to place them.

Sometimes you have to do it a few times, and very rarely items will refuse to stay put no matter how many times you do it but most will. So it is still possible to decorate, but they sure haven't made it easy for us.

Why beth why? I was hoping it was just a random glitch of sorts but your answers are discouraging...what about placing items in display cases, do they end up on the floor as well?

Here i thought lydia cleaned up my stuff and needed to be reminded whose house it is

more/bigger bookshelves, more/bigger armor/weapon display rooms, and extending the armor/weapon display and bookshelf concepts to regular shelves and tables etc would be great.

Ideally you could even designate "slots" in rooms that you could put whatever sort of display you wanted. for example, you have 5 slots on the ground in a room and can put 3 bookshelves and 2 mannequins, or 5 mannequins, or 5 bookshelves, etc....

there should be at least one home in the game that is a humongous mansion for the large collectors like myself. Something like Dragonsreach or the Blue Palace in terms of size. I thought Proudspire in Solitude would be that based on its price, but I was sorely disappointed.

the first time i tried to decorate, I used the Z key. I lit my chair on fire.
Now I have learned to just leave stuff, come back after another log in and finally can place my stuff.
Annoying yes. I love to decorate my homes.

I must say I love the weapon racks and armour dummies but they don't even work right. In my Riften house most of the racks don't work and the dummies keep moving around.