I’m thinking about leaving the wall above the fireplace in chalkboard paint.  I’m also thinking about marrying my newfound love of bright happy fabrics and need for big art.

Like this (you can buy it here):

Imagine a couple of yards stretched across a frame (or framed) above the fireplace.  It’s modern.  It’s silly.  It’s orange.  What more can you ask for?

Well, you can ask for more, like this, which you could buy here if it wasn’t sold out (argh!):

Or either of these (you can buy here):

Or maybe these oilcloths, both from fabricworm:

People, that’s a tiger.  On a tree.  I love absurdity sometimes.

But honestly?  I love the fish best.  Possibly in a frame.

Speaking of frame, haven’t decided how to frame out the fireplace or whether to do it in black or white.  That’s next.  You know, after finishing the plumbing, window trim, painting, flooring and plumbing odds and ends at the other house.

 

I tore out the wonky picture frame thing around the fireplace.  It was solid wood – mahogany.  Doesn’t make it any less ugly, though.  And the stuff around the fireplace?  Two solid slabs of crab orchard stone.  My first thought was that I was right, it was solid slabs of stone.  My second thought was, crap, now I can’t, in good conscience, paint it.

But I did paint the wall and bookshelf (note: the wood shelves are permanently attached in some crazy godforsaken way).

While the first coat dries, I’m off to play at Benjamin Moore.  Any suggestions for a (free) software program that’ll let me mess with the proportions of the fireplace?  I think it needs a tall mantle.  And while I’d love to not trim it out, there’s a gap between the stone and the plaster.  Yes, plaster.  Not drywall, like in normal homes.

More tomorrow.  Smoochies for all the suggestions.  I’m not NOT painting that wall something other than white, but I have white so I’m painting it white for now.

Update: the second coat on the first third of the second wall is now complete.   Valspar’s Ultra Premium Ultra White in Eggshell is nice.  I still think I prefer Glidden, but we were at Lowe’s so I went with it.  Because it’s so thick, one gallon only covered one half of the loooong hallway and one third of this wall, which is a bummer, but I’ll stick with it… since I have no choice now (ever tried to match whites? DON’T).

{Boy, can we tell someone got a new camera, or what?  I’m usually too lazy to photograph things easily seen from my comfy spot on the couch, but this week, I have pictures of the other house!

Also, I feel bad not having shared this before.  Do you blog on Blogger?  And do you hate the way Blogger pulls in photos?  Use Windows Live Writer to write and upload to your blog.  I have no idea if it works for Mac, but on a Windows machine, it’s bliss.  Try it.  You’ll hate Blogger less.}

When I met my husband, he was a homeowner and I was a happy and free renter.  You can read more about that here.  We initially assumed I’d move into his house, going so far as to try to design an addition that would allow my stuff and my cats ample room to fit with his ugly overstuffed couches and TV the size of a small elephant. Then fate intervened (a sign!) and we stumbled upon a For Sale sign on this crazy house at the top of his street.  At least three freak-outs and a handful of panicked sobbing phone calls to my mother later, we signed the paperwork.  The rest is history.

Sort of.  See, we still own The Other House.  Hilariously, we figured we’d replace the siding, redo the plumbing, paint and fix a handful of little things and have it on the market in May.  Last May.  The May that was more than one year and two months ago.  We obviously failed. 

Siding is much harder than you might expect, especially when you nod your head at the collective advice of everyone who’s ever hung siding and then you decide they must be wrong.  And then it becomes an epic contest of who’s tougher, who’s smarter, who’s a winner (and who’s a loser), and the siding wins.  You call in a siding guy who casually tells you he would have cost you less than your Hell Depot materials if you’d called him in the first place.  You decide that denial sounds like a really great place, and pretend The Other House doesn’t exist while spending all of your time getting ready for a wedding at your new house.  And you hire the neighbor kid to mow the lawn so your neighbors don’t give you dirty looks.

Last weekend we spent a few hours (many, many hours) painting the edges of the original cedar siding, replacing the porch light, and other things that seemed important at the time but I can no longer recall.  By we, I mean he… I was playing with my new camera.

Be gentle.

For now, the shutters are white.  We talked about navy blue, hunter green, dark gray, and black, but went with white.  What do you think? And yes, we need to do some landscaping.

This is the view from the front door.  There’s a stream hidden in all of that greenery.

The Interior:

Oh, yea.  Living room looking into dining nook.  When I met him, a wallpaper border graced the room and it was covered in elk.  Yes, elk.  The previous owner put it up and he just ignored it.  For years.

Same room, but from this view you catch a glimpse of the wood paneling (ahem, knotty pine) that runs along the other wall, too.

 

Kitchen.  Oy.  The cabinets are really nice if the country thing is your style.  It is so not my style.

Bathroom.  OY.

Bedroom #1.  Yes, more wallpaper borders, and the suckers DO NOT want to come off.  We replaced the windows and they still need to be trimmed out.

No idea where they got this, but it scares the bejeezus out of puppies.  Not that we’d know this from experience.

Hallway looking past dining room into kitchen.  More pine.

  

Whew.  Back outside.

Pondering shutter colors.  In the middle of the street.

 

Aaaaannnddd…. Frank.  Just because.  He’s not even in that house, but I like the picture even though you can see that he scratched the heck out of his ears because the darned mosquitoes like to suck his blood.

 

So, that’s the Other House.  In theory, we will re-plumb and window-frame and paint, then rent or sell the sucker and bask in the glory of all that extra money.  In practice, we’ll putz around and avoid the whole place until we can’t stand it, then put in a few hours of painting and cleaning – from now until eternity.

Working from home, I’m a lonely and often unmotivated person. A person wearing the same shirt for a few days in a row because it’s comfier after a day or so.  Someone who may or may not walk out to check the mail in socks, flip flops, jeans and a sweatshirt, in July, in 90+ degree weather, because the house stays cool and after hours of sitting still, I get cold.

My point?  Ah, yes.  I did have one.  I move office locations – within our house – on a regular basis.  For a while, I shared a sunny corner office with my husband and his crap (figuratively), my cats and their crap (literally), and wedding-related paraphernalia.  Not the best way to focus on work-related tasks.

A few weeks ago, I moved temporarily into the basement living area, which I posted about here.  With firm intentions of being someone entire unlike myself and actually putting the place together appropriately.  I’ve (so far) failed.

This is the entrance.  The gray paint on the floors seemed like a good decision at the time, but in retrospect, at 10pm with four days before your wedding at home, any paint color that you already own in multi-gallon quantities seems like a good decision.

Continuing in counter-clockwise fashion around the room (much like that crazy Flylady says you should clean), this is the hallway leading to the bathroom (first door) and bedroom (second door).  The builders of our house planned to have their in-laws live with them, and so built a guest suite in the basement.  They were very prepared, though not very good at space planning.  What’s up with the dead-end hallway?

My office resides in the living area part of the guest suite.  Because we’re facing the downhill side of our property, there’s a great view and windows.  The only way you can tell you’re in the basement is the constant 65-ish temperature.  Brrr.

Furniture: the tulip chair wannabe was a score at the Chicago Antique Market (sigh… wish I still lived there for that one Sunday a month), the chalkboards were my own little DIY (and I wish I had like five more), the disproportionately small shelf came from parts unknown, the chair was a vintage find from an office storage sale, the table is one of my favorite purchases ever (it lowers to coffee table height, raises to dining table height, and the tabletop swivels and unfolds to seat six people comfortably), and the little bench is quite possibly a luggage rack that I use for seating.  The arms have carved lions.

It has potential, right?

In this picture you can see the spot of yellow paint on the floor.  Bad idea, though I kind of like the color.

This is my view.  Ignore the temporary redneck fence – it was a quick fix for adrenaline-junkie dogs that run through the e-fence because cruising the neighborhood in a (for them) fun game of hide-and-seek is totally worth it, apparently.  We’re still in discussions over how to fence in the yard.  I don’t want anything that obstructs the view, but I want something better than the redneckville we’ve got going.  He wants anything that will keep me from complaining that I had to go pick up the dogs again, and this time they were just chilling on somebody’s front porch like they belonged there.

Yes, those are socks.  I wear them while sitting cross-legged in my chair and working.  They never touch the floor, and my feet are clean in the way a block of ice is clean, so I rewear them.

So there you go.  My current thoughts involve painting the window frame things yellow, like this picture of one of the apartments I lived in before buying this house…

painting the floors a glossy black, and maybe even ripping out the old nasty stick on tiles before painting, and mounting the chalkboards on the wall, either in a grid or in one continuous line along that wall.

Oooh, and painting the little shelf like this (from DWR):

The furniture needs to be moved around, I know, and I should probably find a rug while deciding what to do about the floors.

Any other ideas?

{Back to slightly more meaningful titles.  But still wordy as all hell.}

A new friend and I have been emailing non-stop for a few days about all things design- and house-related.  Okay, we talked a bit about weddings, but mostly about how drool-worthy shiny black wood floors can be.  And how I love orange and she loves red, and neither of us loves old ugly cabinets, even if they are original.

Sigh.  I love new friends.

I took it upon myself to take (bad) photographs of our house to show her just how horrible our fireplace is, how lost I am in terms of kitchen arrangement, and just how far I am from finishing up my office in the basement.  Since formatting emails around pictures totally sucks, I am posting the pictures and (hopefully) smartass comments here, and opening up the comments and commiseration to all of you.  This is the first in a series.

Reminder: I’m a terrible picture-taker even in spite of advice from Jenna.  On the other hand, it really is that sad in here, so my pictures aren’t taking away from the ambience.

 

Yea.  Not so awesome.  The stone stuff is also on the hearth.  My husband loves the mantle, not because it’s particularly cool, but because it’s “original” (which to him means that it predates us – I can’t imagine it’s original to the house).  I hate it.  I think it looks like a weird, incorrectly proportioned picture frame.  We’re also in discussions over painting trim, so for now, let’s assume it stays funky shiny wood.  And yes, I painted the black thing from a horrid scratched brass to a similarly horrid matte black.

What would you do with the fireplace area?