A Whole New House!

The two rooms are complete, painted ceiling and walls. The room off the kitchen is no longer grey-blue, but a cheery pale yellow with a lovely flat, normal, white ceiling. The "sun room" is a beautiful happy and relaxed light blue, with that flawless white ceiling. Flawless. No more marks and obviously bad painting. The rooms look amazing.

I spent all last night (into this morning) putting the rooms back into the right order and cleaning out everything. I have candles in every room, and they are all neat and clean. The furniture is all in new places but it looks great! The sun room is quite a bit bigger than I realised. The couch that was in it is huge and dwarfed that room. Now it is in here (the living room) and the smaller old couch from Tom is in the sun room with one sky chair and one light green chair from a "house sale". The wooden table along two smaller ones is also in there and no, it's not a tight squeeze. It looks great!

I moved a couple of things downstairs and one chair is out on the curb. The rooms up here are clean, organised, orderly, and pleasantly decorated for anyone's taste - not too much, not too little. I won't get to enjoy it as much during the week as I do on weekends, as the week's time is more structured.

I'm not saying my taste is the only good taste or that everyone would love these rooms, but I love them and my feeling is that in a general setting, they are aesthetically pleasing. I am not one to clutter rooms (although there are times when there is a lot of clutter). I do try to practice the theory of if something doesn't get used within 6 months or 12 months (depending on the item), I throw it away. I hate when "stuff" takes over the house. Ironically when we moved in to the house in October 2002, we couldn't fill up the house. Now, five years later, the house is full to overflowing. The room downstairs is horrifying. That is a scary task to clean that up.

But the upstairs is a wholly different house. The living room used to have a small brown couch set and two mint green chairs, four tables total, and we did not really use the room much at all. It was a museum type living room. Have you ever seen movies or television shows where the woman decorates a white livingroom - white carpet *shiver*, white furniture, white walls (what the American love of white walls is, I clear don't understand. I know many Americans paint every wall in the house white, but it is boring... lifeless, not interesting - unless maybe the ceiling has some different darker colour.

I hate white walls. I have to admit that the previous owners did not have a single white wall anywhere. I fact, I can give you a picture tour of the original house. The living room walls are wallpapered with a nuetral sort of beige colour. It is not objectionable, but at some point it will be time for a change (and I know exactly what colour I want, too). My parents painted their living room/dining room a colour called thistledown beige. It is not a true beige by any means. It is a very pretty colour, nuetral to some degree but not boring nuetral. I had our rental house painted that colour and then the living room of our first house, too. Maybe next spring I will have the living room done. Or the fall - when I have the money.

The living room is the largest upstairs room and it is just over/to the left of the front door when one enters the house. The stairs and the "vestibule" (that is not the right word, but you get the idea) are completely unique. The walls are decorated with shingles. The look is very strange but yet it is interesting and not terrible. The only truly objectionable thing is the Spanish Inquisition light fixture in the high ceiling. It is quite hideous. It is a wrought iron monstrosity that looks completely out of place with the rest of the decor. It has fake candles in it with small light bulbs that seem to burn out at the speed of light. The biggest problem is the same one we usually run into - Luis likes it. I shouldn't denegrate his taste... but it is terrible! (To me, it is.)

The room is nice and once it has the fireplace it will be complete structurally. I hate this process - the plumber has been here four or five times now and it is still leaking. (Good thing there's no gas running through it. I have a million candles burning, in every room of the house. There are five burning in the living room alone. (Hey, I love candles - they are beautiful, bright, fragrant and relaxing. It's worth it to me.

The southern wall of the living room has no windows, which I hate. Older houses usually don't have many or any Southern windows, because houses without good temperature control got too hot in the summer. But I love windows and natural light. I wanted a window installed but Luis is the one with the money and he doesn't see a need for it. Now, with the fireplace going in it's a good thing that we did not put in a window. Once it is complete, we will see what to do. There is a lot of empty wall space there and we can hang a couple of good-sized pictures or many smaller ones. But until that fireplace is complete, there is no doing anything with that wall.

The bay window on the eastern side is what really makes the room so big and roomy. The room size has not changed but there is an enormous difference between the original room and the current one. The old window was a flat picture window with two small windows around it and the small windows, which were opened by pushing up (they had a pulley system, like most late 60s windows. But in the winter, the wind and cold temperatures were too easily felt. It was as if the windows were open.

So in winter of 2004 we had the windows replaced everywhere except the addition to the house (the original house was built in 1968 and the addition went on in 1986). We felt the Anderson windows in the addition were good, solid windows and we really only need the old windows to be replaced. So 22 windows later and $15,000 later, we had a much more temperature controlled house. Now it is evident that the Anderson windows are not so great. However, it can wait.

This room was really just for the cats and now we really use it. The telly is here, the window is beautiful... all I need is something amazing to put in the bay window!

I began all of this on 6 April and then life got in the way of finishing this. As it turns out, I did quite a bit of redecorating and stopped at the "bad store" - Pottery Barn! I found some really great hurricane lamps and have sand for them, and a new candle too. It looks AMAZING!