Room By Room

my new approach to fixing up my house

Remember back when we lived in the other house and after two years of being unhappy with our living room we we finally redid it? Do you remember what a HUGE difference it made? Since getting my new job I have slowly been picking up the pieces of mess that we have let accumulate for the last three years. This is an enormous task. One that I find daunting. It means going through things that I have put off, piles of junk; dusting furniture that hasn't been dusted for months at a time; sweeping and cleaning more often than whenever I don't feel like complete lethargic crap which is never...

The job is daunting. Today, maybe because my spirits are so high from the (for us) happy results of the election*, I had a break through thought: why do I keep trying to tackle ALL of the problems in my life at one time? Why do I keep putting every room in my house on the desperate to do list? The best progress is generally made one step at a time. Small steps. Little bites. Meaningful victories. I realized that I should pick one room to concentrate on at a time.

We've already lived in our farmhouse for seven months and although we've mostly unpacked everything, we have yet to find places for everything. We've painted nothing. And there isn't a single room in which I've really figured out where everything should go or done what I really want with them. Partly that's because every room in this house needs a lot of help.

So I'm starting here: the living room. It is a wonderfully open room with good light (thought not good enough for picture taking) and a nice hardwood floor. So what needs doing? For starters it needs to be repainted. I'm tired of painting rooms. I've painted so many now and I'm just tired of starting over but Philip isn't so I'm going to pick the color (with his help obviously, he's not hen pecked for crying out loud!) and he'll do the painting. What will I do?

For starters I need to tear down that ridiculous curly-cue mantel piece. The fireplace (sadly 100% non-functioning) is quite pretty actually with nice blue tiles. Or it would be if it wasn't for that weird woody growth on top. I'm going to rip it off. I truly hate it. I might be able to do something cool with it later on.

Here's a front view in case you want to keep looking at that strange detail.

The next thing I need to do is tear these blinds down. I'm about to say something really opinionated and five of you are probably going to feel like pummeling me for what I'm going to say...but try to keep in mind that what you do for your own house decorations is not for me to question....

I loathe vinyl and metal blinds. I really LOATHE them. They make bile rise in my throat. They are dark and the vertical ones are the very worst of the lot. They aren't nice covered in fabric either. They really depress me. My window is my view of the outside world. Like my eyes. I want them to be pretty. Or at least fun. Or stylish. Or all three of those things.

Then there's the furniture which must be redone. This is what scares me the most. I've never recovered furniture and I'm afraid of botching it. However, I can't afford to get them professionally done so I can either keep them as they are, which is depressing, or attempt it. The bones of my furniture are good. So it's worth trying.

This was the chair we read to max in ever since he was a baby. We romped on this chair, ate in this chair, and watched movies in this chair. This chair is wearing a lot of drool (not mine), spit up, yogurt, smooshed crackers, and even some kid pee. Wanna sit in it?

It's shredded.

Lastly, there's our very real Art Deco couch. It's been recovered before by the previous owners. We've had this couch for several years and the dog has done a real number on it. Now the cats are doing a number on it too.

Here's the challenge: I don't have a lot of money to spend on anything. So any fabrics are going to have to come from my current stash. Some curtain or shade hardware can be purchased. The fabric for the chair and couch must also come from my stash.

I'm going to go hunting for fabric possibilities and paint chips in my treasure chest and come back here with the possibilities I find. Wish me luck!!!

*Although I'm really bummed that prop 8 passed. In better news we have the first ever half black president and also the first two muslim Americans were elected into governmental positions. All in all I'd say some great progress has been made.