the write space

Jeri is in the business of rearranging other people's stuff.

[thewritespace]

Nesting Instincts and Echoes

There are plenty of times I look back on my childhood and adolescence and think, “What the hell was my mother thinking?!”

Circumstances this week bring to mind the time my mother said, “Sure you can paint the dresser.”

In my bedroom. With red paint. Spray paint.

While the incident probably accounts for more than a few of my lost brain cells, it undoubtedly also informed a life of decorating risks and rewards. It started with a small three-drawer chest, black, with simple line carvings highlighted in gold paint, and gold circle pulls…maybe 3” in diameter, two per drawer. I don’t recall if much prep went into the dresser beyond removing the pulls and a light sanding. I do know that I was scrupulous, in the way a 16-year-old girl with zero tolerance for delayed gratification can be, in prepping the painting theatre. Forty-five years ago there wasn’t a Home Depot stocked with blue painter’s tape and plastic drop cloths, there was only old sheets and newspapers. And a little collateral damage on a garment bag. It’s the garment bag that’s indelibly etched on my mind, much as the red paint was indelibly etched on it. Extra long to encase a prom gown, it dragged on the floor a bit as it hung from the closet rod. It fell victim to the fine mist of over-spray that swirled and eddied under the closet door, depositing cherry red sprinkles on the floor and the garment bag that lay upon it. Probably my mom got upset about the floor. But, come on, it was in the closet. And, hello?! Who let’s their kid spray paint a piece of furniture in the house already?

there’s no photographic evidence of the original, but here’s evidence that I learned from experience, when I recently painted my older daughter’s hope chest, in her living room, with pretty substantial prep of the area. 

And a brush.

I think of this now, because the End Times are coming, presaged by the Pinterest and Instagram pix my engaged daughter is sending me of mismatched chairs spray painted various shades of green. The End Times are coming, because my daughter, her son and her fiancé signed a lease on an apartment. She is in full Nesting Mode. Over the past five years, as anyone who will stand still long enough to let me tell them…and let’s be real, provide copious photographic evidence…I’ve been blessed to attend the birth of my grandson, to witness an incredible bonding of mother and son, to watch a beautiful baby boy grow into a funny, sweet, uh…let’s say persistent, rough and tumble, compassionate human being. My husband and I have been privileged to watch our daughter blossom in motherhood and we’ve been so honored to be integral parts of our grandson’s formative years.

Parents and adult children living together can be a challenge, but I like to think we’ve all risen to it. Probably we could have done better, but I think we’ve done pretty okay. If anyone asks, I would say communication is, as in most areas of life, the key to any sort of success.

I will miss the easy camaraderie and the comfort of the rhythm of our days. I will miss having her as back up if I hear a noise in the night when we’re home alone. I will miss her alternately being my enforcer (really hiding the Oreos) and being my enabler (hiding them in plain sight). I will miss her support and encouragement in all things and her ability to know just the wine I want when I want it. I will miss her proofreading my essays, because I know they’re good if they make her cry.

I’m not crying, you’re crying. I will not tell you all of the things I won’t miss, because that would ruin the flow of my story. As for my Jack…I will miss everything. Everything. From spontaneous “I love you, Groms” to 5:45 am calls of “Is it time to get up?” I will miss him sauntering through our bedroom at 6:30 in the morning on his way to use our potty – when there’s a bathroom right next to his room. I will miss his love of cuddling and the way he has to divide up his time between his people as we watch Fixer Upper before bed. The way he’ll read Sandra Boynton’s Perfect Piggies, “…but don’t sing it, Grom.” And in the next breath will ask me to sing the Armor Hot Dog Song. Everything, 24/7.

My first picture with Jack.

If you ever have opportunity to live with your grandchildren, take it. There is something incredibly special about the bond, the depth of love combined with the lack of responsibility that is precious and priceless. Although to be sure, I have both worried over him more and taken much better care of him than my own children. When caring for mine, I had to answer to me. When caring for Jack, I have to answer to Momma Bear.

Jack enjoys his first Celtics game with Papa.

I think a measure of our success as a multi-generational family is that I don’t want them to go. But I don’t want them to stay, either.

I mean, I do. But I don’t. A twisted microcosm of the roots/wings phenomena. It’s a time for letting go I have somehow not prepared myself for. As I pondered this late last night, in the recesses of my mind I could hear the faint echo of my mother telling me to “Let go and let God.” I think, I hope, I know that my daughter knows how much I love her. And her little boy, too. I think she knows because when each of my grandchildren has been born, I have thought, “There! Now, finally, that new parent knows how I feel about them.” And in grand-parenthood, the depths of love in the relationships I was so fortunate to have with my grandmothers becomes clear. My daughter knows she’s taking huge pieces of my heart with her, as she moves literally, just blocks away.

But I’m still not letting her spray paint any chairs in this house.

new roots, new wings. 

[thewritespace]

Roots, Wings and Transatlantic Flights

Hi. My name is Jeri and I’m a mother. 

 Forty years ago, after I tried it ‘just once’, I was hooked. I spent the next ten years turning them out like a PEZ dispenser. 

 The thing is, I’m not a kid person. Kids don’t gravitate to me. I’m not fun or whimsical. Other people need to see the baby, need to hold the baby. Not me, I’m kind of take it or leave it. Well, unless it’s mine. Before I had kids, I had amorphous dreams of something like…I don’t know, being Carrie Bradshaw before there was a Carrie Bradshaw.

 My mother instilled in me a belief that I could do and be anything I wanted. She was a trail blazer of a single mom back in the day, and she did whatever she had to do to raise my sister and me. I think it was hard for her when, in one of those instances of missing what you didn’t have, my sister and I became stay-at-home moms. I don’t think it was so much the home baked cookies we missed, but a kind of stability that was often lacking in our young lives.

 In any case, when the kids started multiplying, and my husband’s career - which unlike mine was both well-defined and fueled by some serious drive (and relocation packages) – stay-at-home motherhood was a good fit. Early on, I labored under the delusion that it would be easy – how hard could it be with two loving parents and all we needed?

 I’ve picked up on a couple of things since then. The truth is, they will fill your heart, and they will break your heart, sometimes simultaneously. The truth is, you will do anything for them…donate blood and body parts (I’m assuming on the body parts), clean up crime scenes, fight someone for the last Cabbage Patch Doll, move mountains of debt…to give them what you think they need. You will learn that you are only as happy as your unhappiest child and that Sr Mary Eleanor was right, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

 When you build up a tolerance for your kids, they hit you with grandchildren and trust me, there is not a sweeter high than when one of those little beings, brimming with unconditional love, hits you with an unsolicited, “I love you Grom.”

 This really is apropos of nothing, just my existential crisis du jour - brought on by currents of life mixing with waves of sweet nostalgia induced by the approaching holidays.

 For decades our family ritual has been to go to Mass on Christmas Eve, followed by Chinese food for dinner. Christmas Day is spent at home, French toast for breakfast and something easy for dinner. This tradition began after our first Christmas in Texas. That Christmas, in the Dark Ages before Amazon Prime, I bought all the gifts, wrapped, packed and shipped them back to my in-laws in New York, so that Santa would be able to find the kids where they woke up on Christmas morning. My husband and I, three kids (1986), and the dog followed the packages days later. The process was reversed to get it all home. And lets not leave out the part where the dog left a package…in my in-laws bedroom. That was the last time he was invited.

 The next Christmas we wised up and began Christmasing in place, inaugurating the Christmas Eve Mass and Chinese food ritual that we’ve pretty much followed, with additions and minor deviations, since.

 Last night my husband and I were reminiscing about how our rituals took shape and what an amazing run we’ve had.

 I’ve always tried to be sanguine about them coming home for Christmas. I remember how hard it was to divide time between our families when we were first married. I’ve always encouraged our kids to do what works best for them and makes them happy, so they can enjoy the holidays guilt free.

 My evil plan worked really well.

 They’ve kept coming back much longer than I thought they would. There have been a few years when distance, work conflicts and such have prevented us all from being together and I’ve known we have to be prepared for change as the family expands.

 This year, as I look forward to them all being here for Christmas, I’m also looking back at the day my husband announced to his parents, over Sunday dinner, that we would be moving to Texas for a career opportunity. I remember how the color drained from my mother-in-law’s face and the food in my own mouth turned to dust as it dawned on me that my mother-in-law, my children’s devoted Baba, the epitome of a kid person, would be watching her three oldest, and geographically closest, grandchildren move halfway across the country.

 Right before we left, she gave us a framed piece of calligraphy that reads, “There are two things you give your children: one is roots - the other is wings.”

I have carried that piece with us over 32 years and four states. It resonates with me now, as it did then, as our long run of family Christmases is inevitably transitioning to something new. Our oldest son and his family will be moving overseas in January, taking advantage of a career opportunity for our fabulous daughter-in-law. Our youngest daughter will be getting married in October, building a new family unit and embracing new traditions.

 I am experiencing the Christmas season more deeply this year. Reliving Christmases Past as I make my mother’s Springerle and hang beloved ornaments on Christmas Present, our brand-new faux tree. I am deeply grateful for the Then and determined to enjoy every moment of the Now. Thankful for the wise and cherished words from my mother-in-law that informed our parenting; feeling fortunate that our children grew their roots deep and their wings wide.

 And I’m so gonna ask Santa for some transatlantic flights.

[thewritespace]

It seems like yesterday when we were forced to sell our lake house, in the family for 80 yrs. It was a source of peace & rejuvenation especially for my husband, a regular visitor every summer of his life but circumstances necessitated that we sell. Although regrettable it is heartwarming to know that the new owners have taken such good care of the place and that your family appreciates and enjoys what was our little slice of heaven on Lake George. Sorry about the porch, chipmunks and squirrels!

Hi. I just saw your message - I didn’t even know messages were possible until last week!I appreciate how hard it is to give up a family home and Want you to know that we are committed to keeping the place up for generations to come. Our grandchildren adore the place, as do we and we are so grateful for this little slice of heaven.

[thewritespace]

The Quickest Way to Lose Five Pounds

My mother always said that the quickest way to lose five pounds was to stand up straight. And then she’d bark the familiar directive…“Chin up! Shoulders back! Tummy in! Fanny under!”

Go ahead, try it. It pretty much works. Until you have to breathe, anyway.

The summer has been filled with lots of good times, most involving food and there have been more than a few missed Weight Watchers meetings, so these last days of August have become my ‘salad days’. Not the way Willy Shakespeare meant them, though this time of year often has me reflecting on my younger self.

Twenty-nine years ago today, I graduated from college. Fine, they were probably not my salad days, either. I was older and wiser - having taken thirteen years to accomplish the feat. I really enjoyed my time at the University of Texas. I worked harder and appreciated more than my fresh-out-of-high-school-self had and I was exhilarated to graduate at the tender age of thirty.

There was no Pomp & Circumstance, no grand ceremony for a summer graduation, and just as well, since I spent the day in Labor & Delivery, giving birth to our fourth child.

That’s a long way of saying that my baby is twenty-nine today. My baby.

Coincidentally, I’ve recently been sucked back into the rabbit hole (rabbits like salad) of ancestry.com. My older daughter has been digging around the family tree and discovered that my great grandfather Louis, my Grommie’s dad, was married to two people. At the same time.

The revelation comes at a time when I’ve been wondering how to preserve my mother’s bon mots and witticisms (subjective, I know) for future generations. Catch phrases. Familial expressions and inside jokes. Crap she made up. Her renditions of novelty songs from the ‘40s.

Who will sing ‘Mairzy Doats’ to future generations? I mean, besides me.

More than just preserving, I want to understand the life experiences, the highs and the lows and the history of my mother and my grandmother and those who came before them. I wish they had shared all of it with us before they left. Did my grandmother know about her dad’s first wife and her half-brother? Did the half-brother know about the half-siblings that came after him? None of them could have had a clue that the momentous occasions of their lives - marriages, divorces, births and deaths – would now be readily available on this thing called the Internet.

In the moment, Louis probably felt secure that his family in New Hampshire was under wraps to the family he produced in New York.

Moving back to where we were born and raised has fueled a lot of my current interest in genealogy. Earlier this year, I found myself in a diner next to a table of my father’s relatives – a moment of serendipity that opened the door to wonderful reconnection. Now as I sift through census records and city directories, it’s fascinating to think that my husband’s forebears and mine could have crossed paths on an almost daily basis.

My fascination extends to wondering how those ancestors lived and worked and thought about everything. What were their stories of love, found and lost? Of their heartaches and happiness shared?

If they knew we would have access to the salient points, would they have wanted to expound upon the forces that brought them to those points? Do we want to know from a voyeuristic perspective? Or is it the eternal search for connection, for reassurance and meaning in all of life’s occurrences, epic and mundane?

I’m driven by the need for connection, as well as a desire to be a good steward of our family stories. I don’t want to plaster the world with them Kardashian style, what I’m sure my mother and grandmother would refer to as airing the family laundry, but I do want to preserve and pass on the history because it has value and meaning.

A friend recently asked me what I want my legacy to be. I’d never thought about a legacy before and my initial thought was that if I left the world tomorrow, I’d be pretty okay with how things have gone. I’ve never had a burning desire to hit the record books, but the more I contemplated the question, the more I recognized that I want my children to know me, to know where they came from. Not just the physical DNA, but the cultural DNA, the people, the places, the events that defined the lives of those who came before us, giving direction to our own, and those who come after us, as well.

Until I reconnected with my father’s surviving sister and brother, I didn’t even know how my parents had met. They married young and divorced early, and how they navigated life as divorced people had a profound influence on my sister’s and my experience of the world. Growing up, it fostered a special bond between my sister and I, but the topic of our parents’ experience, and ours by extension, was studiously avoided.

But the stories of our parents and grandparents, spoken and unspoken, guide us as we navigate our own lives. When we share our life experience with our kids, there’s comfort and support in the knowledge that we struggled, as our parents struggled, as their parents struggled, to meet the challenges presented by life – marriage, divorce, family, career, death. We are reassured knowing our parents counted pennies as they grocery shopped together as newlyweds. That they had each other’s back shepherding their kids through adolescence and into adulthood. That they weathered windfalls and shortfalls and got to the other side. That they had high points and low points and somehow got through 100% of their worst days, helps us to know that we can, too.

I can use the Internet to look up things like the origin of salad days and figure out what course I’m on, metaphorically speaking, in the seven course meal of life (it isn’t salad). I’m not swirling the drain, but I’m not getting any younger. So I’ll keep up my search, using social media and historical records to identify and deepen our understanding of our story. When I go, I don’t want to take the family secrets and my mother’s one-liners with me.

That’s what blogs are for.

[thewritespace]

You know that one about the two best days in a vacation homeowner’s life?

The day you buy it. And the day you sell it.

Our lake song began five years ago this very weekend.

That was the time we borrowed my sister’s place. It was the first time in years that we had all our kids here together. We were awash with familial love and togetherness.

And then I saw the For Sale sign.

Despite the protestations of, “We are not doing this again,” it was mere weeks before my husband found himself covered in mouse poop and acorns as we removed insulation from the ceiling. I say, “We,” because much like Jim and Marlin on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, he wrestles the alligators, mice, squirrels and bats while I chronicle events. She who sits and writes also serves.

This is much on my mind this morning as I grab coffee and walk to the porch for a quick scroll through Instagram before doing my writing exercises ahead of the morning hordes, who will no doubt render my keyboard if not mute, certainly moot.

It never ceases to amaze me, the feelings I have when I see the sun on the lake in the morning. We don’t own a boat and I jump in the lake approximately every third year - I wouldn’t call myself a water person. But there’s something so incredibly Zen about looking out on the water from my perch on this porch...my attitude gets an immediate adjustment.

Interestingly, to me anyway, the porch weighs on me when we’re not here. It’s long and narrow with a low ceiling and it leaks like a sieve. The ceiling has been opened at the far end, revealing stained and rotting rafters, to allow for the free flow of water as roof leaks are tracked and repairs attempted. The leak of long standing necessitated replacing a few floorboards and the floor got a fresh coat of paint. To protect that effort, buckets dot the floor when we’re not in residence. When we’re here, as this morning, they sit stacked in the corner.

Built in the late ‘50’s, the porch is an addition to the front of what started as a one-room cabin. The original windows thus open out onto the porch, cutting into key real estate in the space. After a few bumps and bruises, and strategically placed benches directing traffic around the open windows, we’ve learned to maneuver with fewer mishaps. The front side of the porch is lined with sliding windows and, despite the screens we had made for them, we quite often vacuum bugs out of the tracks in order to slide the windows open to the lake air.

At the near end, we have our growing rock collection. Rock painting has become the past time of choice for our grandchildren and the porch is both studio and gallery. I had assumed we’d be releasing rocks back into the wild, but no. The ledge that lines the windows is perfect display space.

Not unlike the Zen I get from the view to the water, I find something restorative about the porch itself, even in its ramshackle state. I think about what we might someday do to this space, an ethereal second or third phase plan, to correct the leaks and improve airflow and overall functionality. Should we find a way to salvage the original structure? Is it wiser and more cost effective to remove and replace it?

This morning as I scroll through Instagram lake house hashtags, the polished perfection of space after space stands out in marked contrast to my little happy place. The grandeur and luxury of some of the homes is stunning. As a designer...as a person with a pulse...I love to pore over these images. But none of them capture the feeling that I had when I walked out onto the porch this morning. None of the images captures what it is I’m looking for.

As I sit on the porch, looking at both the minor imperfections and major flaws, I find myself a little resistant to the ‘remove and replace’ option. It’s not so much about respecting the history or integrity of the original structure – which is something I’m always mindful of in my work, but respecting the history of us, the tapestry of our family. Sure, I’d like not to worry about the rain and ice dams. I’d like the chipmunks not to run show on the patio or in the crawl space; I’d like to leave the windows open without worrying about somebody getting a black eye. But I want to avoid something that looks so new, polished and perfect that it doesn’t represent us.

I love good house porn. I appreciate what goes into styling for a photo shoot and what judicious editing can do. But I’m looking for real life. I’m longing for spaces that are lived in. I wish that I were a photographer with skills sufficient to capture what it is I see, with my eyes and my heart, when I walk out onto the porch.

Truths reveal themselves to me this morning.  Maybe you see what it is you’re looking for. And luxury is where you find it.

[thewritespace]

Pssst…House Porn.

I might have a problem.

When I was a young woman and could squeeze a few bucks from the grocery budget, I’d pick up the occasional copy of Better Home & Gardens. It didn’t take long to pick up on the fact that not only was a subscription rate way cheaper, but subscribers got their fix days earlier than the poor fools hanging out at the newsstand waiting to pay cover price.

I was hooked.

In the years between then and now, I escalated from the soft stuff, magazines, to the hard cover stuff -- coffee table books and compendiums of window treatments. My dependence has resulted in copious amounts of time and money poured into my habit; not to mention missed social obligations from falling down the rabbit holes of Pinterest and Instagram and occasionally forgetting to eat. Okay, well, not that.  But it could have happened. For many of these years, I’ve had a good cover: as a design student, house porn was required reading; as a working designer, it’s called Research and Development.

I’ve been reflecting on this because of my growing collection of soft core stuff – those magazines are taking up a fair bit of real estate in my little office. Not quite the stash of my grandfather’s National Geographics, but voluminous nonetheless. Current subscriptions include House Beautiful, This Old House, and Country Living, as well as the previously noted BH&G, (continuous since 1981!). I find this group more relatable, certainly the design more attainable than say, Architectural Digest. It’s a growing collection, because while the idea of leisurely leafing through a magazine is seductive…what is this leisure? The time available to feed my habit is inversely proportional to my stash, making it more prudent to get quick hits on my iPhone and send the magazines straight to the shelf. Kicking the paper habit is hard. What are the chances of getting the publishers to put production on hold while I catch up on the backlog? Right.

So I was contemplating both the recycling bin and cancelling my subscriptions when my deus ex machina arrived in the form of the FedEx guy delivering an advance copy of Sandra Espinet’s new book, Barefoot Luxury.

How to say…SQUIRREL!

The package included a cover letter from Andrew Joseph PR requesting I consider reviewing the book and posting on social media. Crazy. I had literally just listened to Sandra Espinet on an episode of my favorite podcast, LuAnn Nigara’s A Well Designed Business.

Up front, I have to tell you that Espinet is a luxury designer with a capital Luxury. Me? Not so much. I almost passed on this podcast episode precisely because she is so high end. But I’m glad I tuned in, because in the interview, I found her to be engaging and down to earth. I enjoyed listening to her espouse her position on designing from a perspective of what you know and addressing topics I’ve been struggling with internally. Espinet’s thoughtful views and approach to design and business gave me much to think about, and I was excited and flattered to have the opportunity to review her new book.

Honestly, I generally steer clear of the high end market – it isn’t where I come from and, generally speaking, it isn’t what my clients are looking for. Beyond affordability, my first thought tends to be: who’s going to clean that? In our house, it’s me. While my husband might not see it that way, if there’s going to be cleaning done, I’m in charge. So high end design is often off-putting to my practical side. (Yes, honey. I do have one.)

Barefoot Luxury delivers some serious hard cover house porn. Hector Velasco Fazio’s photographs are just what you might expect: breathtaking. They capture the depth of Espinet’s impeccable sense of design, color and context; and the soaring scale of situation and space.  

But I read it for the articles. Really.

The book is over 200 pages, most overflowing with photographs and accompanying descriptors, and just 13 devoted primarily to prose, but those were the pages that captured my interest. Sandra Espinet is an engaging writer, at once hip historian, design docent and intriguing insider. Her words breathe more life into this luxury design travelogue than I would have imagined. I love her background info on tourism in Mexico and the rise of the private communities to which she caters. I appreciate her approach to design which includes a respect for the local community, its artisans and natural resources.

The press packet that accompanied my copy of the book included Espinet’s definition of the concept of barefoot luxury as “the ultimate way of living freely without pretense yet still with elegance and style”. Although I might take issue with the concept of living “without pretense” in one of these Mexican coastline retreats, I can’t argue the “elegance and style”. I think that’s what I liked most about the book – the designs are thoughtful embodiments of what her clients are looking for. They capture how her clients want to feel in their spaces, without trends or gaudy excess. That’s the kind of design I believe you strive for at any price point.

I brought the book with me on a weekend trip to our little camp in the Adirondacks -- lightyears from Mexican Resort Living and devoid of pretense. We have our own special style, though we might be light on the elegance. It was interesting to juxtapose Espinet’s elegantly manicured and maintained resort-style retreats with the reality of our fixer upper at the lake. Call me clueless, but it is one of life’s little ironies that our vacation place is exponentially more work than anticipated. Camp maintenance is not unlike my magazine stash: inversely proportional to the leisure to enjoy it. No staff to prep the place for our arrival, no one to set the Adirondack chairs out on the patio. 

But the thing is, there is a patio, no shoes required. Luxury is where you find it.

[thewritespace]

Sometimes, once is enough.

Here’s the thing about a high school reunion, one you’re excited about, anyway: you start out all bright-eyed and optimistic to see people you haven’t set eyes on in years. Maybe a little apprehension mixes with anticipation, and a cocktail,  to fuel an initial euphoria of OMG!s and How long has it been?s. After a bit, you start to assess. Maybe you’re feeling good about how you’ve weathered the last several years. Or maybe you’re feeling like you need another cocktail and the name of somebody’s plastics guy. In any case, one thing leads to another and by the end of the night you’re remembering that you didn’t miss high school, after all.

That’s pretty much what happened for me with the Trading Spaces Reunion and Reboot when it aired April 8th.

Interior design had been around for ages before Trading Spaces hit the airwaves, but Trading Spaces was the show that sparked the explosion of DIY, home improvement and interior design programs that have become stalwarts of popular culture. With an unbeatable mix of personality, possibility and train wreck, this show truly engaged the audience.  Love it or hate it, you were invested.

I alternated between loving and hating. The loving part was the voyeur in me, the side that tells my husband to drive slowly at night, so I can look in people’s windows to see what design is, or is not, happening within. The hating part was the trained professional, the side of me that wants to create a space that addresses the client’s wants and needs – not artistic expression or network ratings.

So, yes - it was fabulous to see all of the cool kids; a hoot to relive some of the glory days. And if I were looking for a plastics guy, I would definitely call Laurie Smith.

But once the Trading Spaces Reboot started, I was remembering the bad parts about high school. If you missed it, or need a refresher, check out this 360 Degree Tour. Wiggle your way through all of the angles.

Now can we talk design?  

I know a lot of designers and I’m fairly certain they all cringe at requests for ‘theme’ rooms. So Doug Wilson’s “Hawaii Ho!” room was off on the wrong flip-flop from the get-go. Doug’s ‘island resort’ approach was to wrap the walls in burlap. Have you ever used burlap? It smells. It can take weeks to air out under the best conditions – forget the Trading Spaces two day window. It will always retain some of that earthy odor and there will always be fibers breaking free. In this tiny room, where they will have to squeeze through to avoid bruising their shins on the bed frame, they will be brushing up against and breathing fibers in,  on the regular.

And what’s up with the lighting in the island resort? Are the solar panels on the ceiling to facilitate filming or simulate tanning on an island beach?

Next door, Hildi Santo-Tomas was unfolding her “Deconstructed Penguin” design. Her inspiration was a beautiful designer silk. Listen, I’ve seen Frozen a few dozen times -- I’m hip to the frozen fractal vibe, though one might have expected splashes of red, owing to the ‘deconstructed’ part. I understand that budget and available yardage didn’t allow for use in quantity, but to recreate with paint on walls and ceiling was just looking for trouble. In fairness, in the reveal it can be interpreted as a softened watercolor effect of the fabric. If you squint. But sometimes too much of a good thing is really just too much. The small room is chaotic with pattern, leaving no place for your eye to rest. Why not just one wall? It would have been more reasonably managed in the tight time frame, with better results.

As it happens, painting on almost any design show is a major issue for me. Painting skills, or lack thereof, offend my sensibilities to a degree that renders me almost speechless. Almost.

There’s a commonly held belief that anybody can paint. There’s no barrier to entry – you buy brushes, paint, and bada bing bada boom, you’re Picasso. Sure, anybody can do it. But precious few people do it well. This episode of Trading Spaces underscores that point. I wasn’t on board with Doug’s design decision to paint the ceiling brown in the island room, but the worst part about it was the application. The bad cut-in job doesn’t suggest “designer”, it screams amateur! Time, attention to detail, and a roll of painters’ tape could have avoided that outcome.

The fractal effect in Hildi’s room was accomplished with foam brushes and little precision. You can see in the close-ups of the work, that the paint is laid on in multiple directions and thicknesses. Unless someone takes the time to thoroughly sand it all smooth, that will adversely affect every subsequent coat of paint.

And it wasn’t just walls and ceilings, but the painted finishes on built-ins, as well. The Murphy bed in the Penguin room, for instance. An ingenious idea, but how well it was constructed is anybody’s guess. Based on the quality of the paint job, it was another project with DIY written all over it. In crayon. DIY is awesome, unless it’s poorly executed. And then it’s beyond sad. If the design quality and execution of Trading Spaces rooms is not comparable to the rest of the house, the cost of this 15 minutes of fame extends far beyond the redesign budget. $2000 poorly allocated now, can cost thousands more in extra work or be lost in resale value.

Many of the shortcomings of the work are due to the artificial and arbitrary time lines imposed by the format. I know tight schedules are mechanisms for invoking drama and tension, but they ring false, like the scripted exchanges between designers and carpenters fighting about access and deadlines. What it means for the finished product is truly sad for the homeowners.

Ultimately, the fact that the homeowners have no voice in what happens in their own homes is a huge turn off for me. I know it fuels the tension -- that possibility of a train wreck we can’t look away from -- but it runs counter to how I, and every designer I know, works with clients. It’s one of homeowners’ biggest fears when considering hiring a designer: they’re afraid that they won’t be listened to. How unfortunate if the reboot of the show perpetuates that fear.

I loved the reunion. As for the reboot…sometimes, once is more than enough.

[thewritespace]

This is the reason I never watch television.

Think it’s due to my intellectual nature? Hardly.

The fact is, I can’t turn it on. Well, I can’t turn one of them on.

While we may be following the national trend of fewer TVs (we’re down two from our last #newoldhouse) we’re still above average in sheer numbers, at 1.25 per person.  I recently read that the number of US homes that don’t own a TV set doubled between 2009 and 2015. Duh. They’re all at our house.

In any case, if I want to sit down and watch TV in our living room, I need someone else to operate the equipment. I graduated from college. I know my way around a basic remote control. But once my husband gets in the mix, I need diagrams, circles and arrows, and an advanced degree in engineering to catch up on This Is Us or Outlander.

At the heart of the issue is sound quality. When we moved into our last #newoldhouse, quite a bit of effort, and not a little bit of spare change, went into the audio/visual system. The man of my dreams promised me that all of that effort would result in a superb listening experience without the use of the 40” column speakers from our previous home.

Thirty-odd years together.  And I believed him.

He measured, researched, engineered and ultimately installed a surround sound system. Rear speakers. Front speakers. Center channel.  Sub-woofer. 14 gauge speaker wire. Gold plated banana plugs.

Whatever. It was fine.

But since I’m not the audiophile he is, my bar is set pretty low. Similar to where I like the volume. Aside from the fact that people across the street could set up lawn chairs to watch TV with us, it was pretty subtle and low key. As low key as a 55” plasma television can be. At this point in my life, I’d given up trying to hide the elephant in the room. And my beloved had an awesome stereo system for his music.

And, it worked. Everybody was happy. For a few minutes, anyway. Alas, there was an emptiness in my poor husband’s sound loving heart and one day he said, “What if I just set them up? Just see what it sounds like? If you don’t like it, I’ll pack them right back up?”

Reminding me of the scene in Wedding Crashers, where Vince Vaughn’s character, opining on the perils of dating says, “…perhaps play a little game called Just the Tip…just for a second…just to see how it feels?”

Jeri, you fool.

Again, he set about with measuring tape and speaker wire and before I knew it the 40” column speakers adorned the corners or our living room. Now 7 channels of sound powered through a 200 amp receiver.

His mama didn’t raise no fools: his manner of testing the new sound situation was to pop Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in the CD player and waltz me around the house.

And you can’t even see them, right?

Advantage, Dan.

Then we moved to the #newoldhouse, where layout and 1930s construction precluded installing a similar sound situation. Back to the drawing board he went, researching alternatives, finally settling upon a sound bar. A five-speaker passive sound bar plus a sub-woofer powered through a new big ass amp. (Side note: Until he proofread this and corrected me, I thought it was the old big ass amp. He’s good.) Streamlined and unobtrusive, I agreed to it with all due haste, lest he find a way to mount the 40” B&Ws on the wall.

What does this all mean? It means there are four remotes on, and several pieces of electronic equipment inside the cabinet. How many ways can I screw this up? It’s exponential. My other options for TV watching without the advanced degree are at the kitchen table or on the treadmill. Following the path of least resistance, you understand why I went back to Weight Watchers.

All of that is incidental to the fact that I was dusting yesterday - it’s 2018 after all - and putting the regularly used remotes back in line on the audio/visual cabinet, …

…face down to keep the buttons dust free from all of the weeks that I don’t dust. And it was just after I’d read a suggestion from a colleague, Wendy Woloshchuk of Details Full Service Interiors, to corral all of your clickers in a pretty box. Well, hey. If I did that, I wouldn’t have to worry about the dust, would I? As it happens, I’ve got a fake book box that’s been sitting unused on unstyled shelves for a couple of houses. 

Bing.

Bang.

Boom.

Have I learned to use the TV? No, no I have not. But I have learned a valuable lesson.

It’s kind of fun to hide the clickers in plain sight.

[thewritespace]

Report on the DBC

What’s the lesson? What is the take-away? 

Don’t mess with Maui when he’s on a breakaway!

This is how multigenerational living shapes my life: a number of people asked me to share my top takeaways from a recent conference, and all I can think of are these immortal lines sung by Dwayne Johnson (dreamy sigh) in a Disney movie. (Moana, if you’re not hip on what’s hot with 4 year olds.)

I’m sure scores of peeps who attended the Design Bloggers Conference were moved to action by the presenters who shared insider info on affiliate marketing and passive income streams, Instagram growth tips and getting published in shelter magazines.

I, on the other hand, was most taken by charitable innovative vision, a movie mansion, a pizza oven and the concept of serendipity.

Allow me to expound…

A few years ago, a designer friend posted in a Facebook group, asking for support for a blog award for which she’d been nominated.  Wanting to do my civic duty, I clicked over to register my vote. I was a little surprised when I got to the site – an online parenting community - because the banner ads were for alcohol products. No judgment, I’ve got four kids - back in the day, this would’ve been my tribe. After voting, I went back to the Facebook group to report I’d done so and added a comment re my surprise about alcohol ads.

Responses were swift.

“Jeri? That’s called targeted marketing.” Yeah. Call me a tech-neophyte, because there I sat with a bullseye on my forehead and margarita mix dripping from my chin.

This memory came to mind while listening to Adam Japko, the force behind the Design Bloggers Conference, as he spoke to the conference attendees on Monday. Adam was describing how algorithms used in social media fuel our feeds with information that supports and reinforces existing views and biases, encouraging us to live in bubbles. I’m paraphrasing, but at one point he said something to the effect of “…once you find the target audience, you lose the opportunity for serendipity.”

And he probably said a lot of cool stuff after that, but that idea held my attention for several minutes as I contemplated a world without serendipity. I wouldn’t be sitting here, but for a serendipitous moment of connection on Facebook. Serendipity is not just a romantic comedy starring John Cusack, but according to Merriam-Webster, “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”.

A small “ah ha” moment, but an “ah ha” moment nonetheless – keeping ourselves open in order to keep the possibility of serendipity alive.

Later that afternoon, I heard Susan Wintersteen, an accomplished sought-after designer, speak from the heart about an organization she founded, Savvy Giving by Design. This presentation was for me, the most impactful of the conference. Her heartfelt explanation of what the organization does for families with children in medical crisis - supporting, enhancing and enriching the quality of their lives through design – resonated so strongly. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when she finished and received a standing ovation.

Their work is the very best of design, producing rooms that are exceptional in style, function and appearance, without calling attention to the medical realities they seamlessly incorporate.

I contacted Susan about including information about SGBD in my blog post. Never have I wanted more to be the owner of a blog with a wide reach than now, when I’d like to make the world aware of the vision and commitment of this innovative charitable organization. Please, please visit their website; watch the video that Susan presented at the conference. Be open to the serendipity of reading this post and having your life enriched by clicking on those links.

My takeaway here is the reminder that design spans a wide spectrum, luxury to mass market, but at any price point, if it’s good design, it supports, enhances and enriches the quality of our everyday lives. It’s so much more than a high-end finish or state-of-the-art appliance; it’s the lightness of being a thoughtfully designed space engenders.

The opportunity to tour the Greystone Mansion might have been what tipped the scale in favor of my attending the conference. Scenes from a favorite family movie, The Big Lebowski (further insight into our dark minds) were filmed at Greystone, making the tour a highlight of my trip. The 48,000 square foot mansion was built at a cost of $4 million in 1928. While separated by orders of magnitude in size and cost, the mansion does share some traits with the old house we call home, built in the same era, using similar materials. The master bathrooms (yes, there are two) in Greystone’s master suite, sport the same black marble used in the fireplace surround of our little living room. Coincidence? I think not.

My takeaway here, closely relates to the previous, and illustrates that you can live large in a small space.

Finally, my newest obsession was revealed to me at the Closing Networking Gala. Sure, I met a couple of designers I’ve been fan-girling over, but what really got my attention was the pizza. Chef Nick from the Venice Whaler was producing inspired pizza after pizza with the Monogram Flush Pizza Oven. At a cost roughly equivalent to 1000 cheese pizzas, it’s a tad expensive. But factor in the time savings! You’ll save about 3 years of your life waiting for pizza delivery, because this baby can turn out a pizza in TWO minutes!

I’m hoping for some serendipity with the lottery and/or a pizza-loving client looking for a kitchen remodel. 

[thewritespace]

A List of My Shortcomings

Please note, this list is not comprehensive, but for starters…

Appearances to the contrary, I am a prolific blog writer.

Night after night, I work tirelessly crafting essays of unparalleled depth and emotion. Most nights, I say to myself, “Jeri. You should get up and go write that down.” But lost in that magical place between wakefulness and sleep, bursting with lucid thought, I am also a victim of sleep paralysis. 

I should keep a pad and pen on my night table for writing all of those thoughts down as soon as I wake in the morning. But waking in our house is usually heralded by, “Can I get up now?” and I’d rather have breakfast with my buddy than write. So, #1, I suck at writing things down. That might be over critical, because I do write things down; I jot ideas down on bits of paper and in my notebook and on the backs of used envelopes. But too often, I don’t take the time to transcribe those notes into something that looks like a blog post.  

Part of the problem is my attention span. I’ll start out with a really good idea (my opinion, obvi) and start typing away and then…I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye. Not a squirrel. Well, maybe sometimes a squirrel, but more often a spider. My mother used to say, “Every old house has spiders.” And if she were still around, I’d want to be all, ‘Not in this crib, bitch.”  I wouldn’t normally speak to my mother like that, except for she taught me that rhyme about Miss Muffet. Do you know it?

Little Miss Muffet Sat on her tuffet, Eating her curds and whey.

Along came a spider who sat down beside her And said, “What’s in the bowl, bitch?”

There was a G rated version (”What’s in the bowl, babe?”), but I grew out of it.

I think Mom might have also gone into detail about how Miss Muffet dealt a blow for women by standing up for herself and not taking any lip from an arachnid, but none of that negates the fact that our old house does have spiders. Every now and again, one does its best to make it up the water spout by way of my computer screen, or lamp, or window frame. Since I’m relatively certain none of them are related to Charlotte, except in the taxonomic familial sense, the swift hand of justice, wielding a Kleenex, drops the boom.

Although, if my young friend is in the vicinity to bear witness, we have to employ a rescue and relocation effort. The other day, I spotted a spider in the tub while Jack was at the sink brushing his teeth. I casually reached for a Kleenex and, with my back to my grandson, dispatched the intruder.

“Grommie! Why did you do that?! He was not even bothering you.”

And here it is, 5 o’clock in the morning, and this guy pops up looking like he heard there was a casting call or something…

Sometimes it’s just the glimmer of a spider that distracts. That tiny movement caught out of the corner of your eye that puts you on high alert.  Remember when I shared my office awhile back? Then there was the curtain debacle? And then I was waiting for the glass tops for the shelving? There are three walls of windows in this office, how did I not think about glass tops reflecting every bird, insect and airplane that flies by? I’m a little over it now, but the first few weeks with the glass in here and I was jumping for a tissue every two seconds.

That brings me to problem area #2: Delayed Gratification.

Yesterday I wanted to snap a quick picture of fabric samples to send to a client. There was a perfect moment when the light was falling across my desk just so and I realized I’d reduced and recycled enough to frame a shot that didn’t require massive editing. I was so enamored of how things were looking that I snapped a couple more.

Then I went to my files to find a photo of where we started, and that made me think this place is worthy of some professional photos. At the least, some shots that involve planning and forethought. Hmm. Planning and forethought. But who knows when the sun is going to shine and the stars are going to align again over a clean work surface? I want to show somebody right now.

Because I started with this

And we did a couple of things

So this is where I sit now:

It’s been such a long and winding road getting from point A to point B with this room, it makes me wonder…if I had the patience to work through all of that, why can’t I wait for better photography?

Okay, let’s add #3: Making Sense.

But I will not be swayed. I am not delaying the gratification of sharing these early photos. I will not delay the gratification of hitting the ‘Post Now’ button, by stopping to proofread and edit.

And I’m not going to be distracted by the host of ideas I’m now having during normal business hours for posts about the path to this office. I think I’m gonna have to sleep on them first.

[thewritespace]

Root words and recipes.

Roots have been top of mind lately. Quite literally, since I was overdue for a salon appointment. Guess that kills the does she or doesn’t she mystery.

But, roots. Putting them down. Rediscovering them. Covering them up. Rooting for your team (Go Pats!) Rooting around for blog ideas.

I whined about a topic in a blog group the other day. I asked for someone to give me an idea. Pleeeease. My design friend, Darla of Darla Powell Interiors responded first. She said, “Rutabagas. Go!”

You know, a smarter person might’ve chuckled and said, “No, really.”

But…hello. Root vegetable?! Kismet, meet my friend Wikipedia.

Turns out, a rutabaga is not just a big ass turnip. It’s actually the love child of some ancient turnips and cabbages. Not exactly a plus in the PR column, but further reading reveals that they’re really good for you, in a low carb-anti-oxidant-nutrient-dense-cruciferous vegetable sort of way. Well, so what? How do they taste?

I bought a rutabaga.

I googled. I was not prepared for the plethora of five star recipes found on multiple food and cooking sites. I assumed directions for a simple mash, but found recipes for everything from rutabaga cheddar soup to rutabaga spice cake, many vegan and gluten free. Rutabagas can be boiled, sautéed, roasted, fried…did somebody say ‘au gratin’?! I like this article from Rodale Press that includes prep tips and several purportedly healthy recipes. Despite the copious amounts of butter and cheese, not to mention rutabaga, involved I’m going to try one.

I’m less than enthusiastic about heading out for additional ingredients, so I narrow down the recipe field based on what’s readily available in my kitchen. It should come as no surprise that my enthusiasm for executing a rutabaga recipe is inversely proportional to the amount of work it will require. From the recipes in this particular article, factoring in the time of day, ingredients on hand, expertise and labor required, as well as the death row mentality of going to my first Weight Watchers meeting in 35 years tomorrow morning, I opt for the Rutabaga Spice Cake.

Two-point-two-four pounds of antioxidant powerhouse, about to go under the knife. As per the instructions I’ve read, I lop off the top and bottom, and yes, this little Brassica napobrassica is a waxed and slippery thing, but a standard vegetable peeler made for a quick, easy peel. I quickly learned that 2.24 pounds is about two pounds more than you need for the cup of freshly grated rutabaga the recipe requires. So I use a heaping packed cup for the cake and dice up a portion of the remaining rutabaga to boil for a quick snack of smashed ‘baga.

While peeling and grating, I’m acutely aware of the rutabaga’s familial relationship with cabbage and broccoli. It has a distinct smell. It doesn’t seem overpowering at the start, but definitely there. In an unusual cake-baking twist, I have zero desire to test the batter while mixing. Zee. Roh. However, as I’m transferring batter from bowl to pan, I get some on my finger and reflexively lick it off and…hey. Sam I Am, maybe I do like green eggs and rutabaga. Interesting. I pop Ruta-cake in the oven and as she bakes, I no longer regret the battle scars from grating two teaspoons of nutmeg – the ‘spice’ in the Rutabaga Spice Cake - because it’s beginning to smell borderline heavenly. It’s close to bedtime when the cake is finished baking, so I just let it cool before covering loosely. I’ll leave frosting for morning.  

In the morning, Jack asks about the cake and, much to his mother’s chagrin (grandparenthood has its perqs), I tell him he can have a piece for breakfast - after it’s frosted and photographed. In all honesty, I have little hope for this cake. My kitchen smells like left over broccoli. Not good. I don’t know if I can bring myself to waste the additional ingredients to bring this cake to completion. I compromise on the frosting investment by cutting the recipe in half. Brown Butter Frosting is a new concept for me - you cook the butter until it turns brown and smells nutty. This appears to add insult to injury and is wrong on too many levels to count, but I follow the steps. In an act of unparalleled cowardice, I offer Jack the frosting spatula. He demurs at first, but I repeat the word ‘frosting’ and he has a change of heart. He tastes…says he doesn’t care for it…then comes back for more. Okay. Maybe there’s something to this.

Jack gets his breakfast cake and eats the whole piece. Not just the frosting. Hey buddy, should we put a piece in your lunch box? Look at me, using my four year old grandson as a garbage disposal for the cake I can’t bring myself to taste. If it’s going to end up in the trash, why not get a few more phytochemicals in him first? My husband has a sliver. He says it’s good…different, but good. He has another sliver.

I will have to try it, but ever since the first mention of rutabaga, I’ve been hearing an earworm. There’s a Blake Shelton song with a line in the chorus that goes, ‘Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit’. It was an easy morph to rutabaga, rutabaga, rutabaga…spit. And it might actually happen after I taste some of this here ‘baga cake.

The clock is ticking...I take a small piece. It does not taste like broccoli. And the frosting is really kind of yummy. I take another small piece. I think about what I could do next time. Wait. What?  I notice the left-over-broccoli smell has dissipated as I help myself to another slice. It’s really pretty good. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.

I’ve waited thirty five years to go to a WW meeting and life is uncertain. I think I’ll eat dessert first.

[thewritespace]

Is it true?!!

Did you hear that the gallery wall is dead?

Me neither.

Not exactly. Just some internet grumbling...Stale...Overexposed. If it is under assault, I can’t sit still for it. I will single-handedly fight to keep it alive. I could do that in the #newoldhouse, just with covering up the WPFH. We’re like the Louvre on Marion, we’ve got so many galleries. And y’all know there’s gonna be a gallery of sorts in The Office - that magical space that time forgot, though I don’t suppose you’ll believe that ‘til you see it.

Check Pinterest and you’ll know for sure the gallery wall is alive even if, in some cases, we might wish otherwise.  I don’t think that’s because the concept is stale or overexposed, as much as it is overwrought. It’s a case of taking a classic method for displaying art and making it uber trendy. Now it’s like the word uber...you can’t spit without hitting somebody who’s saying ‘uber’ while  demonstrating how to make a gallery wall.

People did as people do, they got carried away and started hanging all sorts of crazy ish on walls - without regard to scale, proportion or context. Start with context. If you just want to fill a wall with stuff because all the cool kids are doing it, you’ll probably end up with a less than artful installation. You have to give thought to the why, then the what and the where and the how.

Case in point: a gallery wall I did for a client a while back. There are lots of styles for gallery walls, I chose this project because it’s a super-easy-paint-by-numbers example. Also, I had pictures. It was completed over five years ago, and I think it holds up pretty well over time.

Here’s my step by step process:

1)      Find a client. Be your own client, if you must. In this case, I had a wonderful client I’d worked with previously and bonus - she had a room in dire need of intervention.

2)      Be the wall, Danny. Be the wall. The client didn’t plan to stay in the house long term, so the plan was mostly cosmetic – make it happily livable, and set the stage for potential buyers a few years hence. I gave her a detailed design plan to implement (undoing some unfortunate design choices, upgrading lighting, replacing counters and cabinet hardware, painting, and so on). When the messy stuff was out of the way, I scaled the wall.

3)      Spend a fair amount of time considering what to do with your new blank canvas. If you’re staging to sell, you might pick up something large scale and colorful at Pier 1 or HomeGoods. For a more personal statement, you could format and apply a meaningful quote with vinyl lettering. Or ding ding ding: gallery wall! As it happened, while the work was being done on the shell of my client’s kitchen, I was experimenting with kitchen photography. I suggested a gallery wall, using some of those photographs, framing them with Wood Gallery Frames from Pottery Barn. These are my Go To: nice quality, inexpensive (as compared to custom framing), readily available in multiple sizes and finishes, with free shipping. Can’t beat a classic. It’s also super easy to change the mood of the room by swapping out photos or whatever you’re displaying – art, fabric swatches – you’re limited only by your imagination. (Note: uniform frames are called for in this application - where consistency and alignment are part of the overall aesthetic. You can mix and match if you’re going free form.)   I mocked up a couple of gallery plans on the computer, but...

4)      ...if you’re trying this at home, your first pass should be making an arrangement in some open floor space. Use a white sheet or drop cloth to provide a neutral background for your art pieces. This will give you a better sense of what works together, both for color and scale.

5)      In this space, having made the decision for precision, I mapped the area the collection would cover, arranging and aligning within a defined space, keying it with frame and photo sizes. You have some wiggle room in a free form gallery, but when you go with a tightly aligned arrangement, precision is key. The center or focal point of your collection (or a single piece of art) should generally be at eye level. In a dining space, because you’ll mostly be sitting to view, adjust it a bit lower. Keep in mind that ‘eye level’ in art gallery-ese, is 57” from the floor.

6)      Make patterns. What? Make Patterns. Do not skip the patterns.  I’m talking to you. If your wall surface is out of the ordinary, like a brick wall, you have to be extra diligent with arrangement: make sure hanging points fall within mortar joints. Or cross your fingers and hope brick clips will work with your bricks. We’ll be testing brick clips in the Lab next week.

7)      Stand back and admire your work.

Whether you need to fill a vast expanse on a less than vast budget or you have a treasured collection you want to display, thoughtful curation and ruthless editing are the way to achieve a gallery wall worthy of the name.

Yes sir, as long as this girl is in the business of rearranging other people’s stuff, gallery walls gonna survive the haters.

Vive le gallery wall!

[thewritespace]

Prepare to be shocked.

My house has been thoroughly cleaned twice in one month.

Okay, maybe not a single month, more like a four week period. Or, wait. Definitely once in that four week period and we’re at mmmmaybe fifty per cent for the second time.

Oh, the wonder of Christmas. It starts with the bizarre ritual where I deep clean the whole house right before the hordes descend to mess it all up. And then back at it when the party’s over.

But that’s incidental to today’s topic: my reflection on the recent holiday.

Even before I started undecorating, I was regretting the short shelf life of Christmas at our house. The person I like to think of as the Evolved Jeri doesn’t approach decorating for the Christmas season with quite the same abandon as would the Dewy-Eyed-Dope Jeri. The evolved persona balks at the time and expense for decorations that will need to be cleaned up in a matter of a few weeks. So, I throw some pine roping over there, toss a poinsettia or two here, and replace existing pillow covers with plaid. And…we’re decorated. I feel pretty good about it, because I vet seasonal decorating the same way I vet any design or decorating prospect: who’s going to clean it?

This year a couple of subordinate Clauses un-decorated the tree and Mr. Claus carried it out to the street.  As Queen of All I Survey, it was my job to turn the vacuum cleaner into a pine needle sachet; my job to repack the lights; the ornaments, the sweet memorabilia of Christmases past and stuff it all someplace where Mr. Claus will probably trip over it.

Side note: please, for the love of all that’s holy, please please PLEASE don’t let me buy the white pine roping again. Restraints, shock therapy, anything. Make me write I will not buy white pine 500 times, which would take roughly the same amount of time I would spend unclogging the vacuum.

Anyway, as we wrap the season up, I’m feeling some bittersweet pangs over how quickly it rolled past. I miss the sweet anticipation I felt as a child, the glorious, if somewhat torturous, build up between the Thanksgiving Day Parade and Christmas morning. In adulthood I’ve become more jaded as the start of the season inches closer to Labor Day and is dominated by the Hard Sell. It makes the bustle of the season less enchanting and I’m usually more than ready to pack it in before the needles start to drop.

I say ‘usually’, because this year there was a difference. This year we were living with a four year old. I have a lot of fond memories of Christmases with four year olds, but the last time I lived with one was almost 25 years ago. Whoa.  And while we lived with a three year old last year, it wasn’t quite the same. There was such an uptick in childlike wonder this year that even my Grinch sized heart expanded a bit.

I think it started with the hand-painted gnome nutcracker and then grew with every new element or decoration. Snowmen, Christmas trees, towels, night lights and a book of Christmas stickers with the go ahead to decorate the hallway with them (take that, wallpaper from hell), all culminating in the main event – the arrival of his beloved cousins, coming to stay for the holiday. My beloved grandchildren all in one place, a gang of four...building forts, decorating gingerbread houses, reveling in each other’s company, so that the house was filled with peals of delighted laughter and palpable joy. Mostly.

And none of it to do with gifts, with the exception of the day the four year old came home from pre-school with a gift for his Mom, asking for help with wrapping, because it was a surprise and “really delicate”. And then on Christmas morning, when the four of them delighted most in giving gifts to each other and their parents. One moment I was thinking, ‘if I could bottle this and sell it, I’d be a wealthy woman.’  And the next moment thinking, how rich I am, to have this in my life.

The reflections bring me to the resolutions:

First, to loosen up for Christmas 2018. To that end, I marked October 15th (too soon? too late?) to shop for good faux roping for the stairway and mantle. And then maybe talk Mr. Claus into a fake tree, so that we can put it up sooner than our traditional December 18th (it’s how we celebrate Mr. Claus’ birthday).

The thought of a fragrance free fake tree briefly made me second guess that last resolution. But then I went to toss those pine branches I’d stuck in a pitcher with water. They’re still soft and fragrant. How about we amend the anti-pine fiat, to allow for pine branches that are maintained with proper hydration? Alright then. The tree lighting is on the calendar for November 24th, the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

It will still be minimalist, but hopefully we can expand the period of childlike wonder. And the number of times the house gets cleaned that month.

[thewritespace]

What I think about when I’m already not ready for Christmas.

What’s your position on the mass carnage of lemons?

It’s been weighing on me. I haven’t started my limoncello because of lemon guilt. Well, that and the capricious and arbitrary limit of 24 hours to a day and 7 days to a week, but - I digress.

Did you know it takes fourteen lemons to make a liter of limoncello? Fourteen large lemons. But just the zest of the lemon. And therein lies the problem. The remaining lemon, naked and vulnerable to the ravages of decay, sits in a Ziploc bag in the fruit drawer of the refrigerator waiting for my husband to use it in iced tea. My husband drinks a lot of iced tea (no, really, a lot), but even he can’t keep up with the naked lemons this month. I know this because I’ve been using two to four small lemons per day in my springerle production and the naked lemons have accumulated at an alarming rate. If two to four lemons a day are getting some notice, imagine dumping fourteen denuded lemons in at once.

I’ve wanted to try my hand at limoncello since the success of the sour cherry liqueur experiment this past summer. 

Syncing lemon procurement with the time required to clean and zest fourteen of them has been something of an issue - a fantasy I’ve been having since the cherry nectar was bottled. Then there’s the waste to consider. Unlike the lemons, there’s no waste with the cherries, the pickled cherries are as good as the liqueur. 

I currently have the required fourteen lemons on hand, and at $1 per lemon, I don’t want to lose my $14 investment, either through neglect or by harvesting the zest and tossing the rest. Time and the sour taste of guilt inextricably entwined.

Until last week when I happened upon a suggestion to freeze fresh squeezed lemon juice in ice cube trays and use the cubes in drinks or recipes or what-have-you. Brilliant. And yet…the thought of juicing fourteen lemons by hand…maybe a negative three on a scale of one to ten.

What do we do when life hands us lemons, Jeri?

We Google.

What I really want to know is: how did I get to be this old without a citrus juicer?! It might be due to an aversion to appliance clutter, or a preference for somebody else doing the work, or C) all of the above, but no matter, Google had the answer. I was led to Juicing Nation’s Top Five Juicers of 2017 and number three was right in my wheelhouse: 50 bucks, sized to fit some open real estate in my cabinet and on schedule - Amazon Prime, baby.

In theory, though at this writing the fourteen lemons remain intact, limoncello is right around the corner. In practice, I’ve tested the juicer on the back log of small lemons used for baking, with spectacular results. Prit-tee sure this is where the expression ‘easy peasy lemon squeezy’ originated.

So that’s my last minute gift guide…juicer, lemons, vodka. If you’re really nice,  throw in a life changing zester, as well. (pictured in foreground of first photo).

That, my friends, is how you make lemonade.

[thewritespace]

Legacy.

A random comment about blogging yesterday morning led to an inquiry about my office progress, which led me to look up from my desk to survey the situation in my corner of the world. Acknowledging a closer resemblance to the tortoise than the hare in the Race to My Office, I thought a progress post, in the Keeping It Real genre, might be in order. I spotted the clock. “Hey! It’s only 7:20?!  I have some time to write, right now!”

Um. What’s that battery for?

Oh. That’s the battery that fell out of the clock when I kicked it over while working on the install of the last rod. At, as you can see, 7:20 the night before.

Escaped my notice, because if a girl has installed rods, 

she just wants to hang curtains.

And when she hangs the curtains, she’ll see that they’re too long.

These would be the 63” panels.

To the naked eye, you’re thinking maybe she should have gone with, oh…perhaps…62.5” panels? Yeah. They don’t make them. And the truth is, the panels labelled ’63 inches’ actually range in size from 63.5 to 64.5 inches. I knew that going in, because having done this a time or two, I assumed some variance and did a quick check beforehand.  In a perfect world, they would all be 63” long, they would fit perfectly in the space allotted to them by hanging the rod as high as the crown molding will allow. And they would not have become blog fodder. Yet, here we are.

The adjustments I had hoped would be minor and accomplished by fiddling with the ring clips, are calling for a different solution. Such is the nature of inexpensive panels purchased on a super Cyber Monday sale. In 2016. Returns are not an option. If the panels are to be hung without digging out the sewing machine and taking up 576 inches of hem, options must be explored.

And that’s how I found myself in the basement, foraging for drapery hooks in the bags and boxes of tricks still waiting to be unpacked. Nary a hook to be found, but hey! Look at this!

A refresher course in Irony: 

Having come up short in the drapery hook department, our girl determines that a trip to the fabric store cannot possibly be squeezed in within the next day or two. It would take at least an hour. Assuming focus could be maintained. In a fabric store. Right. So, drapery hooks are added to an amazon order and we’ll wait to do the fine tuning until the glass tops are installed on the counter, at which point we will know, without question, what the required adjustments should be. Moving right along…

Wait! Did you see that ornament kit?!

This kit has existed in its half completed state for more than twenty five years. My mother was pretty famous for starting needlework projects. When she moved on from this mortal plane twenty five years ago, we went through her things and found more than a few of them. Since I have four kids, I took this one, planning to finish the ornaments as a loving legacy for my children from their grandmother. That was the plan.

My mom had finished the Cowardly Lion, so he made it to the big ornament box. He graces our tree every year. I thought the Tin Man was waiting for his loop, but after careful scrutiny, see a finished ornament. Alas, the Scarecrow and Dorothy haven’t even been cut out. I don’t know when exactly my mother started the kit, but as noted, I’ve been sitting on it for twenty five years. It brings back happy memories of my mom and how she’d swear a blue streak when her French knots got knotted. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s my visit from Christmas Past. Christmas is, by all accounts, right around the corner.

Do you see what I did there? I spent two hours examining and waxing poetic about an unfinished needlework kit, when I could have been, I don’t know…taking a trip to the store for drapery hooks?

[thewritespace]

the path to enlightenment, renovation edition

Let’s recap, shall we?

Three weeks ago I exposed the dark underbelly of the design beast that is my office. To the world. Girl goes out on a limb like that, you probably think she’s got ‘finished’ tucked up her sleeve already.

Ah…no.

Three weeks ago I was caught up in a current of closet chi, playing a game of chicken with the ebb and flow of energy. Ebb won. I think I had a relapse of renovation amnesia. I forgot that life happens while you’re making other plans, so I hadn’t factored in other people’s schedules or considered that the unseasonably lovely weather would turn on me. So, while it only took five days to actually sand, caulk, prime, and paint my office, they were five days splattered along a two week continuum.

My office door, which was supposed to be a quick dip in the refinishing pool, has had me treading water for weeks. When it was finally stripped, sanded and ready for stain, I had a color crisis. Designers are their own best and worst clients. We get to do whatever the client wants, but the client puts inordinate amounts of pressure on us.

I took the time to play with some stain to make an informed color decision, but  made a rookie mistake using a less-than-fresh can of polyurethane.  

Jeri, Jeri, Jeri. Are you new?! 

That first coat of ‘fast-drying’ poly took four days and countless kilowatts (fan and space heater) to dry. I knew better, but was so impatient to get done. I could have saved three and a half days of drying time by making a 20 minute trip to Home Depot for a fresh can. Please remind me of this when I work on the rest of the doors, ‘kay?

So, here I am. Keeping it real. The dark underbelly is no longer so dark, but it’s also not done and I’m still trying to find a place to work.

I have more satellite offices than NASA. I start in the dining room. When one of my work-from-home housemates is on a loud conference call, I pick up and move to the bar in the kitchen. When other housemates want to chat me up, I lock myself in a guest room. The laptop may be portable, but my samples and swatches, reference materials and whatnot are harder to access - still waiting to be fully unpacked and reorganized in the new space.

I was getting a little impatient with this office roulette, and searching for a quiet corner last week, when I happened to glance toward the office.

I was captivated by the light. As I walked toward it, it was like choirs of angels singing and I felt such a rush of joy. This space is so worth the time and effort that’s going into it.

True, the door is acting more like a desk than a door and I really appreciate my guy Stanley holding it up for me all this time. It’s so close to being done! With the really messy stuff, anyway.  Wouldn’t it be lovely if this were HGTV and a crew was going to descend to clean the grout haze off the floor, put the hardware back, install rods and hang curtains and unpack all of my stuff?

But, this is real life. I’m calibrating my expectations about what can reasonably be accomplished in the next week or so. Pacing my steps on the path of acceptance, in order to better enjoy the way home.

[thewritespace]

The wallpaper from Hell and other office gossip.

I don’t know how it works at your house, but around here if there’s an aspect of design that offends my sensibilities, I’ve been known to resort to vandalism.  Like, if the color of the family room offends me, I splash a few paint samples on the wall. And I’m not discreet about it - focal wall, about eye level is good. You can really move a project up the food chain that way. Don’t like the wallpaper? Start stripping it in a very conspicuous place. Oh. Bummer, honey. No way we can salvage that paper.

While the technique has worked for me in the past, I’m a little off my game. It’s unfortunate that the sick peach undertones of the wallpaper haven’t grown on me in the past year, because while I was able to get it on the Hit List, I was also assigned to get it off the wall. Let me tell you, this stuff was applied with perpetuity in mind. This is what I’ve accomplished in the past year...

There’s about a million square feet of this stuff and since chewing it off an inch at a time is not my idea of a good time, I opted for a cover up - covering as much wallpaper as possible with every photograph and piece of art we own. 

Not a long term strategy, but enough of a diversion that I was able to start another project, my office, which is also unfinished. 

But the skeletons have come home to roost in the closet adjoining my office.

And while I can live awhile longer with the wallpaper from hell in a state of suspended animation, my office situation has become untenable. It’s been waiting to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted for several months, and in that time has become a wasteland of stuff I can’t put away because, keep up! -  the room needs to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted. The skeletons have me thinking maybe I can tap into the Closet Mojo. 

Since the Closet Exposé, harmony and balance are almost as easy to find as my clothes. Could an Office Exposé - metaphorical paint swatches on a wall - bring similar results to my office space? I’m a little afraid that pictures of my office in its current state could go viral. In the design world, you don’t want to be famous for ‘Before’ photos, but if I hafta throw down to represent, I’m willing to be the lab rat of design research. 

The following images are graphic and disturbing. How does she live like that?!  How can she find anything?! That, my friends, is what I’m sayin’. 

This is the here, this is the now.

Game on. Watch this space.