Home for Christmas

And Happy New Year!

I hope you've had as lovely a winter holiday as I have.  We've been in the house for four weeks, and though I've been a little harried by the cardboard specter of boxes-to-be-unpacked (ALL must be unpacked! NONE may stay!), I'm a little awed at how at home we've been in our new-old house.  Because let's be real: most of this house didn't use to be here.  Even so, I'm so happy and not a little surprised to report that the whole place feels like somewhere we've lived for 10 years.  Boxes underfoot and a surfeit of furniture, for sure, but home nonetheless.

Welcome home flowers and wine from our nice contractors helped.

So, let me tell you about my favorite stuff so far, glossing over the fact that the living room is full of stuff to be atticked and the landscape is...well, it is NOT.

Our "yard."

Though I planted some flowers in a pot.  It helps me feel better.

Though the yard is still grim, the porches are highlights.  I'm still eyeing possible furniture for the back porch, but all you really need for the space to work is a fire and a place to sit, and I've got that wrangled.

A bird never hurt, either.

The kids' rooms were instantly homey, and neither one has had a problem with having his or her own room.  Can you blame them?  I think they definitely got the best deal in the house.

Even messy, as they instantly were and are, they're spacious and cozy at the same time, and SO full of sunbeams. 

The library is the only room still full of boxes, but it looks great anyway.  Books are their own decoration.

My favorite rooms are the working rooms of the house, perhaps because they don't really need much furniture.  

I've done three weeks' worth of laundry now, and having a counter to fold on as well as a pretty room to do it in is even better than I anticipated.  Our trees are full of migrating birds at this time of year (Yay! for having a garage to park in!), and I feel like I'm in a tree house with all the flitting and tweeting going on right outside the window while I'm working.  I like doing laundry, you guys.  Amazing.

The mudroom is perfect.  There are shoes and coats everywhere, but that stuff is not all over the house, and that's amazing.  I think it looks functional rather than messy, right?

I think the pantry is my personal masterpiece, though.  

I love some well-organized shelves!  These may not be that, but I love that I can give all my random stuff space to breathe so that it looks purposeful rather than as haphazard as it really is.  "Cozy chaos" is my actual decorating style so far.

Here's my little baking station at the back of the pantry.  I've made sweet rolls, and dinner rolls, noodles, cookies and cake, and it's all worked out pretty well.  I think I need a mini-fridge to keep eggs and cream handy, but I'll get more use out of this than if it were a desk.

This is my favorite part of the kitchen--the hot drinks zone.  I wanted to keep the open shelves we had in the old kitchen in this corner, and again, orderly-but-not-perfect vibe makes me happy.  I'll never be allowed to be on Houzz, though, because I failed to heed a friend's great advice about the plug strip and let them put it on the underside of the cabinets so there are visible cords all over the place.

And the banquette will be a little more bare when the Christmas decorations go, but it's been awesome.  Eighty meals so far, and I haven't broken it yet.

Picture next to the banquette--lovely housewarming gift.

So the kitchen is awesome.  I've had a lot of fun with it.  I can show it to you because it doesn't require any furniture.  I'll leave you with a montage of stuff we've cooked in it, and I'll get to work on showing you the night-before-move-in tour of the finished house, because it doesn't need furniture, either.

And a Christmas tree.

Pièce de Résistance

There are a lot of things I'm really excited about in my house.  I love lots of stuff, for sure, and I've had the pleasure of being able to choose things for my house that I think are really cool, and I've enjoyed telling you about them.  I hope it doesn't diminish any of the other things to tell you this one might be the most exciting.

I ordered this beautiful thing in March.  They built it to order (in France!) and shipped it here on an actual boat in August.  They call this color Griotte, or "cherry."

Some folks dream of cherry red sports cars and wide open autobahns, and though I tell you I would not turn down one of those, I dream of cherry red stoves with an 18,000 BTU gas burner and electric and gas ovens.  I dream of rolling layers of pastry on my marble counters and baking up croissants (one day!) in this shiny beauty, of simmering caramels and gravies and roasting giant hunks of meat.

This is the centerpiece of my kitchen.  Every decision has centered around how it would work with this range, and now it's here.  This is my big "Voila!" and even though it will probably take me a while to build up my skills to drive this beautiful machine, the fact that it's here feels straight-up miraculous.  I'm off to lose sleep looking at these pictures.  Bonne Nuit!

Final Countdown

We have a move-in date.  We will be moving in to our new-old house on December 3, whether it's ready or not (it will be [fingerscrossed]).  Did you know, by the way, that movers are cheaper on Wednesday?  Now you do.

This feeling I'm having about moving in, I know it.  Not the crap-crap-crap-I-hate-moving feeling, though I'm having that one and I know it well, but the crazy-giddy-with-anticipation feeling.  I haven't felt it in years.  I think I felt it as I realized that I was going into labor with my son, and the morning of my wedding, but I know it best from childhood.  You know it, too, I bet.  The feeling you'd first get on Thanksgiving, when it would pop into your head, "Next comes Christmas."  Tummy butterflies and a little dizziness.  And the same wobbliness as the joy washes over you every time you think, several times a day, that Christmas is coming.  You can't help thinking it, and every time it almost knocks you out how excited you are.  Remember that?  Yeah. That's how I feel about moving into my house.

I drove by (stalking patterns well-established) today and realized that two weeks from this minute I'll be sitting in my shiny shiny wonderful house and I made some kind of weird beeping noise.  I don't know what it was, but it was a happy sound, and I couldn't help it.  SO EXCITED.

Here's some stuff I'm excited about:

New water line!  Ok, this is a picture of a ditch that I took in the dark.  But there's a shiny new PVC water line in there, and that's super awesome.  100-year-old cast-iron supply and drain lines sometimes break, you guys, and then some poor plumber, who even at $85 an hour is underpaid for this kind of job, has to come fix what's been escaping when you flush your toilet and it makes a really terrible smell in the yard.  Not OK.  This is SO exciting.

Shower glass!  Super sweet.

Appliances! An actually functioning dishwasher is so amazing.  I can't wait.  

Shiny floors!  They're actually curing right now.  I took this picture through the window, and they'll get another coat of whatever (shininess?) after Thanksgiving.  So pretty.

So soon I'll have to take you room by room to show you all the goodness, but not until the floors dry.  Do you feel a little of my Christmas-is-coming butterflies now?

Let there be lights

There's just something about a porch light that says you're home.  

These are my porch lights, and this is my home.

They got all of the lights installed a few weeks ago, and it's amazing how much different proper lights make in the homeyness of a room.

We got all LED lights for our can lights, and we were a little nervous they'd have that industrial, fluorescent quality.  They totally don't, in my opinion.  I'll have to keep you posted about whether the cost of the LEDs is worth it, but all of the Internet reviews make it sound like they'll last until the kids are in college.

As always, there's one light fixture I particularly want to show you.  I saw it in a magazine about three years ago, decided it would go in my dining room, and never wavered from that decision.

Not when the super-nice guy at the light store told me it was too big for my dining room.

And not even after looking at roughly forty zillion crystal chandeliers in various sizes, shapes, and price ranges.  And who can resist a crystal chandelier?

Evidently, I can.  I don't think this chandelier is for everyone, but the day it went it I spent about an hour laying in the floor gazing at it and taking lots of pictures.  I think it's perfect for my family and perfect for this house.

 

So my awesome chandelier is made of blue bottles.  They're supposed to be "vintage," but I'm not sure I believe that they are.  No matter.  I do think they're pretty.  They're hung on some artfully rusty chains and metal that I also think is pretty.   I like to think of them as my own indoor bottletree.  

Here we go again!  I don't think I'm crazy superstitious, or anything, but I like stories.  I think the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are, and as a nomad growing up, I kind of adopted stories I liked to give myself a background I didn't really feel like I had.  A lot of what I like about Southern culture is the way it shamelessly appropriates bits and pieces from "mother" cultures and spins them into a new thing.  The South takes the refugees from every diaspora, welcomes them, and makes them at home.

So bottletrees are one of those things that are folk art now because people think they look cool (and they do!), but I guess they've been around forever in people's yards.  They're another protection story; the Internet says that in Africa, centuries ago, people believed that an empty bottle hung outside the home would capture roving evil spirits (like a genie) and keep the home's occupants safe from harm.  So when people were brought here as slaves, they preserved their own culture as best as they could and started putting bottles on trees here to protect their homes.  You'll see them all kinds of places, (like my favorite college-town bakery, where I first learned about bottletrees), but the story is the same everywhere: put up a bottletree in your yard, and the evil things or haints that drift by in the night will get trapped in the bottles and will be burnt up by the rising sun.  I know, people were totally obsessed with keeping the haints away. No one really knows why it became widespread; the Internet also links the practice to witch balls as a Northern European tradition, evil eye amulets near around the Mediterranean, and even the Native American story of the dreamcatcher, so there's somethings about blue and glass and circles that speak to people everywhere of protection. 

This is what I love; the idea is universal; no matter the culture.  There are bad things in the world.  As my favorite, favorite writer (Stephen King!) puts it, "The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted."  I think slaves in antebellum America knew that well, not to be too glib about it.  Fortunately, home is an antidote to the bad things, a guard against the teeth, and pretty things make the antidote stronger.  Especially blue glass things.  Especially shiny, milky blue glass bottles hung in concentric circles in one's dining room, bright against the darkness, yes?

Full Circle

I had an itch to see my house today, you guys.  I clearly don't hold back from stalking the house, but mostly I limit my hovering to drive-bys.  In one of today's slow, creepy, drive-bys, I saw a big box in the front yard, and after a moment's consternation guessed that they finally brought my bathtub.  I've been dying a little, since, to run in and check it out, but I didn't really get a chance during the day today and was waiting until after the kids' bedtime to go visit.

Imagine my grouchiness, if you will, when my husband came home from work and said that the keys in the lockbox were missing and he couldn't get in to the house.  It's happened before that someone pocketed the keys for the evening, and it's not really a big deal, except that I wanted to see my bathtub RIGHT NOW.  Like the stubborn goat I am, I went to the house anyway and scowled at the empty lockbox.  Then I figured out how to get into my house.  I'm not going to tell you how, but I'll assure you that I didn't break anything (on the house or myself).  I'll also assure you that my method of entry was not a dignified action for a middle-aged mom, but it was more dignified than the gymnastics I had to do yesterday to slither into our stuffed storage unit to extract the kids' Halloween treat bags.  I'll finally assure you that there was no way I was going to be denied entry to my own house, and that's that.

And y'all, my hijinks and resulting loss of dignity were so worth it.  First of all, I did get to see my BEE-YOU-TEE-FULL bath tub.

Cue angels singing, etc.  I almost didn't come back to the apartment.

So comfy.

Lovely as my awesome bathtub is, it got upstaged tonight.  This is not what had my clapping my hands, jumping up and down, and shrieking a little with delight (alone, in an empty house, deranged fan-girl stye).  Before I tell you what did, we have to go back a little.

Remember this?

When they first started to destruct the house, they uncovered this old wallpaper in the bathroom, and I was so overwhelmed by its awesomeness that I became a little obsessed.  I started googling "pink bird wallpaper" and hunting vintage wallpaper sites, convinced that I needed this in my new house.  I never did find anything even remotely close (probably a blessing that I didn't), but I did come across a zillion "pink bird wallpapers."

I found one I particularly liked, and as I kept searching I found myself coming back, again and again, to this whimsical and happy "Early Bird" pattern.  It wasn't hot pink water birds and giant water lilies, but it spoke to me.  I decided I NEEDED a whimsical and happy wallpaper in my house.  I kept searching, but I knew as I looked that I had found the wallpaper for me.  I finally screwed up my courage to buy it, no mean feat given that I know beans about wallpaper in general, but in the moment of decision, I noticed a tag on the thumbnail of my wallpaper: "No Delivery Outside NL."  NL? I thought.  Dangit.  The Netherlands.  I had become convinced I needed a wallpaper that I'd have to go to Holland to purchase.  I called Holland and spoke to some super-nice Dutch folks, who assured me they were unable to ship to the US.  Thwarted.  At the eleventh hour.  I put it out of my head and started looking for other "pink bird wallpapers."

That wallpaper was meant to be with me and would not be thwarted by anything like the Atlantic ocean, however.  My beloved college roomie's beloved sister is currently living in Holland due to a military posting!  I hatched a plan.

I ordered the wallpaper and sent it to Sista, and she kindly agreed to accept shipment of the wallpaper and send it to me.  No customs issues, no delays, no nothing!  And tonight, you guys, tonight I got undignified and scratched an itch to get inside my house no matter what, and I walked up the stairs and saw this in my laundry room:

There are no pink birds on my wallpaper, but it's pink and it's got birds, and it makes my laundry room just about the happiest place in the entire universe (which is pretty impressive for a laundry room!).

Cue clapping and jumping and shrieking.  This calls for even more than angels singing, but I can't think what that might be.  It's just awesome.

I picked my blue knobs while the wallpaper was still making its trans-Atlantic flight, and I hoped they'd look right with the wee blue birds on all that pink, and oh, it makes my heart happy to see that I think they do.  This looks like a room where I can fold endless boring piles of laundry and still sing.  This looks like a room where I'll want to sit for hours and sew curtains for the roughly 8 million windows in the house.  It looks like a new room with functional plumbing where I won't get whacked with the back door or the pantry door that nonetheless belongs to my sweet old house.  It's worth breaking in, and clapping and singing, and I hope there's a little happiness in the house, too, that it has some pink bird wallpaper again. 

Solid Surface Materials

I've mentioned before that we took a loooong time planning for this house-fixing.  Two years for architectural plans alone.  I'm not naturally a patient person, though I'm working on that, so those two years were making me pretty stir-crazy by the end.  So I started picking stuff out.  I picked out all my plumbing fixtures, for example, LAST September.  And all the tile I picked just before the start of 2014.  You know, three months before we even got started.  

With the plumbing, it seemed my advance work served me well.  Everything was handled, and I didn't have to get stressed under a deadline.  With the tile, my impatience got the better of me.  I picked some stuff that ended up being outrageously expensive (5 times! the cost of the less expensive stuff I found to replace it).  I picked some stuff that came with a 10-week lead time.  And I picked some ridiculous stuff that I think no sane person would put in their house but that I love.

The problem with tile in particular is that it is so permanent.  Yes, you can take it out, but it's expensive, and messy, and hard work, as one of the tile guys likes to tell me every time I see him ("Trabajando duro, Señora.  Para usted."  Reproachfully.  I know!  I'm sorry!  I'd say I'll pick easier tile next time, but I hope there will be NO next time.  I've just started hiding from the tile guys.).

The other problem with tile is that a wee sample can look so different from a whole room full of tile.  So as the tile has started going in, I've been holding my breath.  I peek around corners, one eye closed, ready to hang my head and admit my failure in choosing a tile, ready to live with the consequences of my impatience for 20 years.

You guys, so far, so good, as far as I'm concerned.

Laundry room

Kitchen backsplash

Guest Shower

Guest

Master 

Master shower floor

Boy's shower nook

Girl's shower nook

Kids' floor

Kids' floor

So you really can't go wrong with white subway tile, as far as I'm concerned.  And I love that we've restored the hex tile that was originally in the downstairs bathroom.  And you'll just have to wait with me to see that floor for the kids' rooms revealed.  I think 99.9% of everyone who ever sees it will think I have lost my mind, but I think it's spectacular.  And the stuff in the Master bath just fills me with joy.  This floor is everything I hoped it would be, and I am pretty good at hoping high.

Seeing the tile go in feels like a reward for all of my patience, as well as a reward for all of my impatience.  Like everything in the house, it feels like a reward that I don't deserve even a little bit, but I'll enjoy spending the rest of my life trying to.