Our House

There are many things I love about our house. It is old. It is not a cookie cutter. It has character. It has history. But, as is usually the case, those descriptions also come with concerns like drafty windows, and no insulation in the walls, and cracks and repairs that come with a 60+ year old house.
Our house is a fixer. And that's fine -- it has good bones. And we're excited (for the most part) to keep improving it.
My dream for the next big project is this:
In a small corner of our living room, under a built-in bookshelf, on the day we first looked at the house, I saw this: hardwood floors underneath a less than perfect carpet. I fell in love. "All we need to do is rip up the carpet and re-do the hardwood floors. It will be beautiful!" I'd like for it to be our next big project. To say it intimidates me, is an understatement. I think it may literally put Brad into heart palpitations.

When we walked into the house for the first time, I said "I love the character. I hate the paint. All we need to do is paint it."

So we did. We went from a teal green, sea-foam green and yellow living room and fireplace, to a dark chocolate mantel, chocolate walls and cream colored trim. The mantel is now my favorite place tho show off our children's masterpieces.
It didn't come easily. In scraping 60 years of wallpaper we found many imprefections underneath, messes to clean, holes to fix (and likely some lead paint to inhale.) But we worked hard, and stripped the walls bare, and drained ourselves of all energy.
Now the chocolate walls and cream trim are inviting, relaxing and only in need of the final touch: crown moulding along the ceiling. Its only been a year since we painted... I'm sure we'll get to that eventually.Next is likely the dining room -- filled with more of the colorful greens and yellows, more unpleasant wallpaper and more "chacteristic" trim along the deocrative windows, that will require hours of brush-work.

We are not fans of the wallpaper. So we've coverd most of it with much more beautiful creations:There are many things I love about the house, that would be much harder to change. Like the many windows. We still have the dream of replacing them with energy efficient windows ....... like was done in the back half of the house before we moved in. Eventually. For now, they provide beautiful natural light, and nourishment for the plants.. and the souls.
It's a work in progress. Like me. Eventually we'll get the colors we want on the walls... the floors we want beneath our feet. And then it will be time to move on, to a larger house, (maybe in another city) with more space for friends and guests, a rec room for slumber parties, and a second bathroom for our children, who soon enough will be entering the stage where fighting over the bathroom is NOT an argument I want to deal with. One stage at at a time. One project at a time. We may just get this thing done before we have grandchildren. Maybe.