(image from the Pottery Barn website–ohmigosh, what a great space!)
Growing up, I spent my weekends helping my mother with home improvement projects. After my parents divorced when I was seven, my mother rented a house for a few years while she finished her degree and got her bearings, and then she paid $17,000 for a run-down, three-story Victorian sitting on a corner. By “run down,” I’m talking missing walls, holes in the floor, the whole nine yards. Contractors came in and the house was completely overhauled. My mother used a government loan for single mothers to do the work, and it required that you had to be living in the actual house–so there were winter nights where we holed up in one room with a space heater, and many a winter day where we wore coats in the house, because the work to totally install new electric, heating, plumbing, etc., took several months.
This is what it looks like today (courtesy of Google Maps)–it’s not the same color as when we lived there, and it’s now run-down, and there’s no longer a picket fence. But you get the idea.
My mother often told me that this was probably “the most interesting house you’ll ever live in.” It was well over 100 years old, probably the first house built in the entire area. See the witch’s cap? When you walked in the front door you entered a grand hallway with a curving staircase up to the second floor, such that you could see all the way up to the ceiling of the second floor (which had a large, massive globe of a light hanging down). Tall ceilings, hardwood floors, iron grates over the heating ducts, a clawfoot bathtub in the bathroom. Without a doubt, it is the most interesting house I have lived in thus far.
My sister and I spent weekends helping my mother work on this house. We did things to speed along the contractors, mostly. They hung drywall, and then we put spackle over the nail holes. We helped to line up wallpaper. We painted trim and painted rooms with rollerbrushes. And of course there was an endless amount of work to be done with the yard–always leaves to be raked, a retaining wall to pull weeds from, a lawn to mow, something to water, something to mulch. My mother was a master at finding creative ways to get things done–for instance, in Kansas City the Parks and Recreation department would cut down trees or trim branches from power lines. What do they do with the branches afterwards? Cut them up into mulch. And then what do they do with all of that mulch? Well, nothing–so if you wanted, they would dump a truckload of mulch in your driveway for free, if you requested it. My mother would have them dump a truckload of mulch and then we’d spend the next three weekends filling the wheelbarrow and putting mulch around all of the appropriate spaces.
And when we weren’t doing that, we were going to antique stores and estate sales.
At the time, I hated all of this. I hated the gardening, the enforced weekend work, the requirement that I participate in hanging wallpaper evenly. And thank goodness I hated it, right? Because a ten-year-old who genuinely loved that stuff would just not be normal. (smiles)
But now? Now that I’m an adult and putting down roots? Oh my gosh, I cannot get enough. I think I salivate the most over (cringe) Pottery Barn. I just love the style–the mixing of the new and old, the bright and the colorful, the texture. I cringe because, of course, Pottery Barn is an Evil Capitalist Company who probably employs badly-paid sweatshop workers to work in factories that pollute the earth to make over-priced furniture.
Do I redeem any points if I share that I have never actually bought any furniture from Pottery Barn–I just ogle their catalogue like it’s something illicit? Would you still love me if I bought just ooooonnnneeeee desk from there? Just one?
(also from potterybarn.com)
Anyone remember that episode of Friends where Rachel and Phoebe are living together, and Rachel gets an apothecary table from Pottery Barn and tries to convince Phoebe that it’s an antique? Phoebe is anti-potterybarn and believes everything should be a real antique, and wants a story behind it.
I’m so Phoebe in principal, but then I start looooookiinnnngggg atttttt the cataloooooogggggguuuuueeee and the hypnotic draw of Pottery Barn draws me in.
Okay, I’m only partly joking, here–in fact, Andy and I buy as much as we can via the amazing Alameda Antique Fair, which sells quality antiques for prices that are comparable or cheaper than PB. Also, I don’t take quite such a hard-line about capitalism or sweatshops. Everyone’s gotta buy toothpaste somewhere.
Beyond texture, I’ve been trying to figure out what else it is that is so alluring and this picture helped me figure it out–look at that organization wall! As someone who also confesses to finding it a perfectly good use of time to wander the aisles at office supply stores, examining the hole-punches and paper clips and new ideas for ways to use post-its and planners and (okay, I’ll stop there), the Pottery Barn aesthetic of “everything in a place–a place for everything + organized + beautiful” just sends me completely over the moon. I look at that office and think, “I would not mind hanging out in THAT room all day.”
So, I digress with all of this background. I wanted to write about creating a home. I have never felt as though Andy and I had a real “home.” There’s always been drama! Whether it’s been leaking roof and broken windows and bad electrical drama, or “we’re selling the house” drama, or the neighbors below us act obnoxiously drama, I have not felt like any place we lived has been a place where we could just…ah…walk in the door and…reeeeeelaaaaxxxxx.
We have now found a cute little bungalow house all to ourselves. There is an adorable backyard, and a freakish-looking but affectionate stray cat named Gregory who likes to hang around (we discovered yesterday that he basically thinks the house is his and will walk in and settle himself right down among the boxes).
After getting everything out of the storage unit and into the house, we commenced with painting. Goodness but I love the owner of this house. I love that she is cool with letting us make the place our own. Love it love it love it.
My office will be YELLOW. I keep feeling this need to type YELLOW because I’m so excited about YELLOW.
Virginia Woolf believes every woman needs a room of one’s own–Kate Swoboda believes every person should have, at some point in their life, a YELLOW office. I am still in the midst of painting it YELLOW, a beautiful Tuscan buttery YELLOW. I will finish the job today.
Before we left our last permanent place of occupancy and started house-sitting, I was trying to figure out other reasons (aside from the chihuahuas, pomeranians, obnoxious downstairs neighbors, dude with the loud muffler, etc.) for why I was not digging the place. Perhaps the design was it, I thought. Andy and I had embarked upon a binge of organizing and getting rid of things and I started reading design books. One that I fell in love with was Apartment Therapy (you can also view its accompanying website). I had felt again and again that I didn’t know what my “style” was in a home office–I didn’t know what I wanted out of it or how to make it a place where I’d like hanging out–and I would get things for the office that I thought looked good, and then once they were in the office it was kind of like, “Hmmmmm. I like it, but I don’t love it. Why? I thought it looked great at the store!”
I did all of the exercises in the Apartment Therapy weeks, and what I discovered was that a.) I wasn’t using a color scheme that appealed to me for the space (I am more of a “warm” person for office space, and a “cool” person for hanging out on a couch reading space), b.) I wasn’t organizing the rooms with a sense of “flow,” and c.) I was buying cheap substitutes rather than saving up money for what I really wanted, which was a waste of money, which made me hesitant to spend money because I’d be thinking of the last time I spent money and ended up regretting it.
You can see my last office space here– man, when I look at that picture, I think, “How cluttered! Yick!”
It did not help that this house had exactly two closets–yes, two–and they were only 3″ x 3″ and were taken up completely with our clothing! Office supplies were going on baker’s racks in the laundry room, and this was a huge pain in the arse to deal with, and very ugly to look at.
When getting organized, we also really liked products from the company Buttoned Up. My mother had bought me the Life.doc kit, which combines all of your essential information into one handy binder. Andy and I filled all of this out, made an Emergency Preparedness Plan in case of earthquakes or natural disasters, and bought a large tub from Target and filled it with about $130 worth of non-perishable canned goods, instant coffee, and a flashlight that winds and thus never needs batteries.
I have to say, it surprised me how much more relaxed I felt after taking the steps of getting our vitals together and a stash of food–I had had no idea that it had been weighing on me that we hadn’t done that, until we’d completed it and sent our EPP to our families.
But the last thing I’ll touch on (because man is this getting long!), is that creating a home has been as much about the two of us as about anything else. Creating a home has been about the peace we have here, and that involves cleaning up our messes, our withholds and resentments, all of the “gunk” that can build up in a relationship. It’s amazing to me how we would never let nastiness build up in our bathroom tub, but we can get lazy about letting nastiness build up between us. With that in mind, we’ve been really hitting it hard on our 3x weekly check-ins, processing out issues, and speaking up as soon as any tired, frustrated, or irritated energy comes into the room.
Home = beautiful design + beautiful energy + functional + love.
What does your home look like? I’m so curious to get decorating ideas. The entire photoset from the last home we lived in is here, and in case you hadn’t seen it, I also love and adore Kelly Rae Roberts’ sense of style (if she were not rocking out already with art-making, she’d be a kick-ass interior decorator).
Feel free to share your Flickr sets or links to home decorating pics in the comments!
Zen student equals “meditates daily and full of compassion” to some people. You can imagine the reactions if I dropped the F-bomb!
