Hinting at Story, Hinting at Period

Since I do not have hundreds of thousands for a total remodel and repair of this old house, there's just no point attempting to make this disjointed house tell a consistent, lovely story. Plus, I do want to experience the discipline of not having a "design budget." This is the reality of most budgets. So what to do?

Even as the story translates to juicy design elements throughout the house, I’m cutting it back. ... and cutting it back even more. Erasing most: I am NOT doing the picture railing throughout the public areas. I’m not repainting the existing trim that wonderful green, nor the walls the rich champagne. It's money and time I don't need to use up. It hurts- some, since the designer me can see how elegant it would look! No, instead, I'm understanding that I need just need a few hints.

To satisfy my design urge, I'm putting up beadboard to 76"  in two places: The hideous little hallway entrance to the kitchen - our S curve that you saw in my November 28 post, "Searching for an Affordable Honest Man", and the small hallway leading to the half bath. Ultimately the bathroom will get the new palette and beadboard as well. That palette will be bright white on the beadboard, champagne accent and on the high bit of wall remaining above the wainscoting, this wonderful dark heritage blue I found. That way the S-Curve will hint at Country when people enter, and also be brighter and way nicer. The palette reappears in the bathroom hallway as another hint of period and then may become my palette when I finish the master bathroom in the former laundry room. I'd love to have a beadboard and rich blue bathroom!

Another trick I may want to do - since the pretty green I was going to do as the common area trim is not happening now, is bring the white, the blue AND a more mellow green into the kitchen in "Florida Cracker" style, which really speaks to me and about me:

architect, Jim Strickland of Historical Concepts

The cabinets will be white generally, but there will be "surprises" of green and accents of the same dark blue in strategic places. 

Hmmm what color the island?!

I am the perfect Crash Test Dummy, Part 1

I’m TJ. And while I happen to be Loni’s partner in life, it turns out I’m also the perfect crash test dummy for this project. So I’ll be sharing my experiences as an active passenger, as we go from plans to remodeling to adding housemates.

I started calling myself the crash test dummy when we first were seriously considering this project. Why?

Because, compared to most other people I’ve known, I have a very high need for physical and personal privacy. Due in part to how I grew up—large family, no private spaces, no respect for boundaries, my father’s profession requiring me to be a public person and under social scrutiny all the time. And in part due to my nature—I’m an introvert in most circumstances, and an empath who more often feels drained rather than energized being around other people. And I’m also a musician with sensitive hearing whose sleep is disturbed by noises.

My de facto solution has been to have as much private physical space around me as possible. Whenever possible as an adult, I’ve had a bedroom to myself as a creative studio and personal lair. When there was no bedroom available, I improvised: to escape living in a triple dorm room in college I moved myself down into the furnace room of the off-campus house. When I lived in the Hopi village of Lower Moenkopi, Arizona, I moved into the unheated upper floor of a stone barn to have space to myself. We were only eighty miles from the Grand Canyon, so at night it was colder than Hades. And I’m not joking. But it was a respite from the constant social flow in the main building of the old Mennonite mission.

(You could also say that by moving onto the reservation, and down inside a desert wash, I was trying to put as much private physical space around me as possible. Once you left the lower village, if you didn’t go up to Tuba City, you could drive your car or ride your horse for hours and not see buildings or other people. When my Hopi friend Lyle was still alive, he would sometimes loan me a horse, and I would ride all day by myself, soaking up the solitude and feeling my way through the seemingly endless desert .)

So, our thinking goes that if Loni, with input from me, can do space planning that adds two or three new people to our existing house AND gives me enough experience of privacy to be comfortable-- well, you’ve got some good crash test results.

Anniversary Meditation

December 15th is a Saturday this year.

The harvest table stands waiting for me face down on the tarp. It' a quiet winter day.

It would've been my 33rd anniversary had my husband lived.

TJ and I drag the tarp and table into the light in the center of the room, we gather brushes, paint, and rags. Then together we tape newspaper around the finished tabletop.

Kneeling low and focusing on small tasks feels just right today.

When I mix up the first batch of milk paint, I expect it to smell pretty acrid, having lye. But instead, the smell is earthy and organic. Dash is fascinated. Having researched the how-to aspects of this project, I recall someone saying the paint smelled like a country barn... like cut grass and healthy animals. I understand. It smells alive.

We each take a leg diagonally opposite - TJ and I, that is - and begin to brush on the paint. It is thin, but easy to work with, and even though we did no prep to the raw wood, it rolls on smoothly. TJ and I work in parallel for a while, until he heads to the kitchen to make dinner.

I am alone.

I like pushing the brush along an area of wood and watching the raw wood disappear under my hand. I hope the terribly bright green dries darker. There's no battle with drips, no streakiness. So there's no hassle. It just covers more, and then more wood. Stroking on the bit-too-bright color satisfies.

The task moves forward in quiet. I sink into the rhythm of that progression. Still on my knees. Still aware that ten days ahead is another anniversary...the 18th since his accident, and his death.

Coat one dries quickly and I return to my starting point. Yet this time when I return, as then, it is different. The color looks yet richer. I appreciate the small steps I take to move the job forward, even as I remember other years.

The next day, Sunday, I apply the wax stain to the legs. My brightly painted legs are transformed into antiqued, dark green appendages that speak of an earlier time.


Together the table, and I, are fresh today but with remembrances of a past.

Prospect & Privacy

It’s intriguing to think I can use the qualities of light to offer refuge to others here as well as ourselves.

How much will different light, especially natural light, make for separate space? 

I like the notion that I can use it to create  a sense of separateness to anyone we  invite in be it a weekend, or a few months, or maybe a more permanent sharing.

Phototropic

I’m like a houseplant turning toward the light. 

Light alerts me, and brings me around. After 18 years in the Pacific Northwest, where darkness falls before 4 during the winter, it’s no wonder. I hunger for brightness in my eyes every three days throughout the year or so down here. It’s sunlight I crave, not the heat.

At night however it becomes a problem. I don’t know if it’s my very pale eyes, but since I’ve been eleven, I’ve had to shut out light in order to sleep. Never mind the chapter about the Nazgul Blackriders sniffing out Frodo I’d just read. It had to be scary dark for me to fall asleep.

So it just so happens that we have Skytubes in our family-room turned bedroom. The lenses that cover these 16" circles on our ceiling make the light sparkle. When it was a family room, it was wonderful! But now as our “lair,” uhm, no. 

So we’ve covered them with upturned large flower pots on the roof which happens to be flat. Now that we’ve moved the bed down to one end, and we’re giving TJ the other side of the bookshelf/divider for his studio, we uncovered the one immediately over his studio area behind our high headboard. 

My intention was to make dark fabric covers to Velcro on or off from the inside (We won’t have easy roof access when we rent out the master suite upstairs.), but I haven’t gotten to it yet. So we’ve been sleeping and letting the morning light intrude.

I’m surprised. 

When I don’t have to rise to an alarm clock, the growing light seeps gently around the 6-foot high bookshelf/headboard while I sleep. Like Vermeer paintings, it feels soft and humble. It has been lovely to wake up to, and it doesn’t intrude before I’m ready. That one Skytube can be quite bright when I get out of bed and tussle with the puppy to say good morning. 

Light gives us such a strong sense of place,…and also a “separation from.” Think of a pool of light over a table in an otherwise darkened room.My friends and I used to frequent the Cork & Board, a wine and cheese place near my University back when. We had to let our eyes adjust to the low light for the first few seconds after we stepped through the entry door, but could already hear quite a bit of chatter, laughter and wine glasses tinkling at the tables. The large wooden tables were big enough for game boards and food, and closely spaced. But once my friends and I were seated under the hanging lamp that spilled light over our own table, the joyous noise of people around us fell away, and felt ..away.

Or have you’ve ever stood inside thick adobe, rammed earth or strawbale walled homes? The light coming through the deep windows framed by the thick walls has a removed quality. Rather than streaming into a hot spot on the floor like most modern homes, it hits the deep broad sill  and frame and bounces softly, spraying indirect light into the room. The pathos plant in me likes the feeling.

What I believe I’m experiencing now in the mornings is also like that. Light beyond or behind adds to one’s sense of refuge, making it feel a protected place to sleep. Nice.

I found our table

...well, actually, I made our harvest table! It comes next Wednesday. And it really feels like mine.

I picked the table top and the legs - well TJ had a say and more than agreed to what I wanted. It's a 7-foot long wooden door from an old factory made of Siberian pine, with an unknown history in a few repaired patches. You just want to run your hands over the dark stained boards. To make it into a true harvest table top, they encase the door with perpendicular "breadboard ends."

I read somewhere that Siberian Pine wood has excellent resonance qualities and is used to make pianos, harps and guitars. Fits our family!

I told the store, which happened to be closing for good the next weekend, where I wanted the legs placed so we had the right amount of overhang (to look like our vision of a harvest table ), and still offer enough leg room at the ends. We pulled 3 ladder-back chairs up to another similar sized table and slid three chairs between the leg placement we measured. They will easily slide underneath. Eight people would fit around our table comfortably.

A silverware drawer in the skirt would've been just perfect, but we are getting a custom assembled table to my specifications using the inventory still left. At less than half price, I can't really complain. In fact, it feels very much like the best part of when I redesigned old broken homes: I used the essential good bones that were there, but made it into something fresh and wonderful.

We paid, set a delivery date and headed back to our car in the heavy rain, excitedly talking about our table. Just as he started the engine, I told TJ to wait, and ran back to the store. "Don't finish the legs or skirt," I told them. " I'll do that." I'd seen many wonderful, distressed milk paint tables while doing my farm table research. 

I don't need another task in all this project planning,shopping and designing, and I have no idea what I'm getting myself into figuring out how to use lye-based milk paint. But now that I've had a direct hand in creating this focal point to our new way of living, I just need this table to be really ours. I want my hand in the table's history too.

The Kitchen

I figured out the kitchen today.

I’ve lain awake nights trying to reform what we call our "Vortex Kitchen" so it flows for 3 more people trying to prep or cook a meal at overlapping times in the evening. We have a big kitchen that can accommodate several cooks, except  for one thing: There’s this central butcher block island with a stove top right across from the sink. 

Great you think. 

But no. The real chopping space, and ALL the cabinetry is on the other side, so you spin around the island every time you need a bowl for mixing, a spice for seasoning the cooking pot, or a fork for stirring. We’ve crowded the island with canisters of utensils, and we just chop veggies on the tiny side areas by the cooking elements. 

But it hungers to be a collective kitchen…and now I know how to do it, and not have everyone feeling like they’re intruding into my kitchen, or waiting too late to start their own meal when others are finally at the sink washing up.

Ideally, with budget, I can accommodate a second cook with a second work triangle created by 2 sinks pivoting around a cook area. That what they teach you. But I might have 3 cooks, and 4 individuals trying to store food, and I don't have an ideal budget either. Two triangle areas, especially 2 sinks just may not happen. Luckily, I have a separated cook set up: My oven/convection microwave is around the other side from the cook top side of the island. So if I drop a free-standing range  into the place where the oven is, I would have 2 cook tops,  one on each side and …then, I’ve found a place next to the sink for a smaller fridge.

Wait, too costly. Think simpler, Loni.  Plus, if I expand the oven into a full stove top range, I may have to remove an overhead cabinet that's too close. No, storage is precious. Instead, I'll get a two-grill electrical unit that will plug in as needed, where it's needed, and use it as an expansion of stovetop cooking. Flexible.

 

Aloha

Pineapples… The chairs had pineapples carved on the back. 

The table was huge and baronial, not farm. Not right.  We traveled for an hour each way to find the right piece for a Farm table and chairs at a good price. I don’t know if I can do this…

I realized that the whole story of my house transformation swings around the idea of a farm or house, and the dining room table for eight has to be a harvest table. You know, reclaimed wood top with turned legs, maybe a drawer on the side, maybe painted, but worn painted legs. But all big and full of a life it has lived before we got it. That’s what I want to invite all my people to sit around with cups of hot cocoa, and coffee and tea. I realized that finding that piece is pivotal, even if it means selling my glass top, wood and anodized metal table and chairs (sigh! I still love the set. It was the first piece of furniture I bought just to please myself.). Having that dining room right is the visual anchor to how I design this the right way. How this will all work.

And it took a whole day to schlep to go see it. It seemed to have what I needed when I spoke with the owner and I'd like to think well of myself for reusing an item. And the table did, but it was heavy. Just heavy and Hawaiian with raffia seated chairs that were unraveling.

Can I do this? 

Search.

The Lair Redux

Moved our bed to the other side of the room yesterday and turned it 90 degrees. 

You have to understand that we are already sleeping in the old family room downstairs behind the kitchen. It isn't really a bedroom. It was an add-on in the 60's,  and as is typical of the rest of that upgrade, it has exterior siding on its walls. 

But...

It's very removed and private, away from the kids upstairs, and it even has a little sink/bar in one corner. Years ago, I convinced TJ it would be a lovely removed boudoir. And if we put a simple room divider that had one side as a closet, and the other a bookshelf, we'd create a sitting area as well, That seating looked out onto a small enclosed piece of our yard that we could make into a garden.

We've loved the realm we created, if not the finishes in the room. The room divider offered some soundproofing from the street noise beyond the "meditation garden."

So the current move: Now we face the small garden. Our sleeping space is really tighter, but it feels intimate with a view, and I really like it. I specifically wanted to remove the bed from possible view through the doorway since it's to a common area (the kitchen). Now it feels very private, even though it’s in the same room as before. (Gotta clean up that garden now though.)

We hung up  our private lair pictures, ones we haven't used in years. They found their own perfect wall.

....Now if only I can figure out where to put the emergency food storage we’ve store in corner of our new bedroom. Staring at it really changes one’s mood.

Stuff

I’d never considered the assorted furnishings and things I have come to own as an advantage. ‘Til now.

I’ve lost lots of dear people very early in life, starting with both my folks by 28, so I’ve “acquired” things of mixed quality, that either have sentimental value, emotional burden or the responsibility of a “legacy for my kids” attached to them. I’ve always dreamed of a simple place where I actually chose my own furnishings and decor. Mmmm!

However, now that I’m looking at the idea of sharing things with others, I’m seeing value in an assortment of tastes, an eclectic mix. Beyond begin responsible and reusing, it’s fun to offer different sized and styled mugs. There’s playfulness and a welcome in saying- “Pick what you like.” 

I also am coming to realize that I won’t be too upset if things are broken. In my group home, I can let go and relax about stuff to enjoy the company. I can more easily loosen my grip on possessions. And that’s a value I treasure more than my treasures. So now I can pass along the hand-me-downs to fresh eyes and minds that won’t burden the items with history or baggage. Who will just enjoy the choosing process, the sharing, and the aesthetic of the piece. 

Now these things can enrich. Whoda thought?