Your home reflects your personality so let it shine through!

My aunt Faye loves houses.  She’s the kind of person who will drive by a beautiful house and stop to ask them if she can see inside.  I was with her once…mortified…but it was very cool going into a stranger’s house.  I’m not sure why Aunt Faye loves seeing the inside of houses; maybe it’s for the same nosy reason I do…I like to learn things about people.  I like how someone’s home reflects who they are.

If you go into my brother and sister-in-law’s house, you will find a lot of kid toys and German flags and pictures of family and friends in frames.  If you dig around (which I don’t but I’ve been there enough to know) you’ll find a cabinet full of cookie tins.  You’ll find a lot of baking sheets. You’ll will find a lot of animals, inside and out.  Somewhere in their closets you’ll find my brother’s State Trooper uniforms and military stuff and probably a lot of t-shirts related to German soccer.  The house is not the type with everything in place.  In fact it’s more like an explosion of life in motion.  Without even knowing my brother and his family, you know the kids are #1, they value fun and life over chores, they love family and friends, they love animals, they have a very strong tie to Germany (my sister-in-law is from there and my brother was stationed there in the military).  You know there’s some baking going on…serious cookie baking in fact….It’s the kind of place with a pulse.

Or you can go to the home of someone with a home for show; a home that resembles a furniture store show room with nothing personal, everything hidden.  There is no pulse in these homes.  The dweller is striving for perfection.  This perfection can tell you that here lives a person consumed with impressing others or someone who is OCD or someone who is avoiding something in life.  They focus so hard on keeping everything in check so they will not have to face something…themselves? Some issue?  There is something painful there they can’t cope with.  Some hurt.  Something in the past they think they can fix by cleaning.  There are things in their personality they don’t want you to know.  If they have all the best kitchen equipment on the counter top (the mixer etc) but you open the cabinets to find nothing or minimal pots, you can assume this house is primarily for looks, to impress others.  No real cooking goes on there.  There are clues everywhere, even in a museum of a house.

I favor houses with a pulse…I like to see homes with weird collections and unique pieces of furniture and things that seem to have a history. When someone tells me that they admire so-and-so’s house because it looks “like a magazine” I yawn on the inside.  What’s interesting about that, other than a fascination with perfection.  Perfection (or the attempt to achieve it) is rather fascinating but ultimately a bore.  The reach for perfection has its uses.  Trying to be a perfect pianist or painter or writer or baker etc can improve your skills but you’ll never reach perfection…ever.  Trying to be perfect at anything that is your true passion (and maybe it’s decorating) can be meaningful in its way.  But striving for perfection without joy is like gorging yourself when you’re not hungry. Strive for pleasure over perfection I say

So today I thought I’d share a link to one of my absolute FAVORITE sites related to homes….you get to see inside the homes of creative types:  http://www.theselby.com/  these are the spaces I love and would want to spend time visiting.

Yesterday was the big day…the start to our hardwood and cork flooring installation. Estimate by  Lowe’s  to do the job is three days (Wed.-Fri)…I had fantasies of it being done in ONE day because I seem to enjoy setting myself up for disappointment.  In my fantasy, ten people show up and work in rapid strides, hammering away in rhythmic time like the Blue Man Group. By lunch they’re on their way out the door.

One lone man rang my doorbell.

So much for fantasies.

His English is only so-so but in combination with elaborate hand gesturing, he conveyed that the transition between two rooms will block the pocket door unless we remove (pay them to remove) the vinyl flooring.  Three layers of vinyl.

yikes...that was some ugly linoleum under there...70s I'm guessing.

It turns out only one layer would need removing.  It easily peeled away from the surface of the previous vinyl.  He asked (three times before I understood what word he was saying) for FLOUR to sprinkle over the floor because it was very sticky. In the new wreckage of the kitchen/keeping room/sun room, I managed to find a jar of flour.  I stood mesmerized as I watched him cut a strip of vinyl, peel it back, sprinkle the flour then sweep it around.  I never would have thought to do that.  Alex would have come home to find me stuck to the middle of the kitchen, gnawing my foot off.

But I underestimated our lone man Lee.  He arrived 15 minutes early yesterday and worked until 8pm.  This morning he was here at 8:30am.  He finished ALL of the cork yesterday!  If you’d have seen the floors at noon yesterday (while he was still cutting door frames, telling me how he would need to cut a bit off the bottoms of two other doors, asking me which way I wanted the cork to go etc), you would never have thought he would have finished a single room yesterday.  Watching renovation in progress is like watching a surgeon do plastic surgery…it’s hard to believe that gross mess will turn out to be something attractive.

if you're curious, this is the layer that is UNDER the second (70s) layer....he removed two layers in the foyer.

the way we live now...after getting everything moved in, now we've had to dismantle it for the floor work...

another old house surprise...the shut off valve for the fridge is under the house..not behind the fridge

Alex in his cute workman suit, going under the house to shut off the water to the fridge...you would NOT get me under there

Lee working in the kitchen ...cork is looking fantastic!

pantry

So today Lee will put the trim along the walls where he’s completed the cork and install the hardwood in the living room/library area and foyer.  Not sure how much he’ll get done today but if yesterday was any indication, he’ll make a ton of progress.  Last night he vacuumed and cleaned up and left everything in great shape (unlike the flooring company who did our laminate at Pepperhill).  At least I have a nice place to hide out with the cats.  We’ll be down in the “man cave” while hammering and sawing are going on upstairs.  When they did the laminates on Pepperhill, I had to lock all the cats in our Master bathroom!!!  And I had to spend all day finding things to do away from home then round up all the cats the next day and the next, back into the bathroom…It seems amazing sometimes when you think about things you somehow managed to do…I think, in the words of Danny Glover (and MomC) “I’m getting too old for this shit.”