The Entry Room

There are two lists for my house. What I would like to do and What I can do right now that will work until I can do what I'd like to do.

What I would like to do in the entry room is build a floor to ceiling closet with a hall tree that has a bench on one end that looks nice and has enough room to store things like the sweeper and my stepladders, etc. (On the wall in the picture.)

What I can do is rearrange furniture to make the room more functional vs. just a place to stick various piles of stuff that have no place at the moment.

What I did was swap Ethan's computer table (an old Arts & Crafts desk that someone sawed the legs off of a long time ago--just the right height for a four-year-old) with my typewriter desk and a so close to matching that it could have been built for that purpose stick bookcase, thus creating a nice little spot to keep all my cookbooks together, along with a desk to sit down and look for recipes. That also freed up about a shelf and a half in the kitchen, where we'll eventually put our cereal and suchlike in glass jars.

I still have a lot to do in this room, organizing-wise; I have to get all our junk mail off the mail table and take it to work to be shredded, I have to figure out how to organize my shipping boxes for ebay, and I have to finish painting the cute white cabinet that Mom and Dad found at the yard sales a couple of weeks ago. But the cabinet now has a place in the Entry Room, Ethan's computer looks great on the other wall (the wall where the piano was supposed to have gone) and I really really like my cookbook nook.

My idea (I came up with this Friday at work) didn't quite work out all the way, since I thought the wall was longer than it actually was, but I had thought to move Mabel's crate out from the wall and put a very tall set of shelves behind it that could hold my boxes and possibly make room for the sweeper and the ladders (unobtrusively; at the moment the ladders are hidden behind the door.) Unfortuantely, there isn't enough room to move Mabel's crate out from the wall at all, since the bookcase was an add-on idea at the last minute. So I'm still trying to work that out.

I moved the eventual bathroom sink into the bathroom, and it's #1 on my list of things to do ASAP, since the door won't open all the way now and it's going to drive me nuts. However, at least it's in the right room now.

(I need Dad's help for this, since I have no idea what I need to buy/how to switch out a sink. And since it's our only working bathroom sink, it's important that we do it right the first time.)

So. I think October is going to be my work in the house month; I'd like to get the wallpaper finished in the kitchen and paint my hallway too, both things I had hoped to get done much earlier in the year. I also have to start making things for both craft shows in October--in truth, I should have started already, but I haven't. So it's going to be a busy month.

It's Plywood! And Kitchen Flooring...

Okay, my kitchen has ugly vinyl flooring that is probably 20 years old and is worn down in places, and is in terrible shape from my dog's nails and pretty impossible to get and keep clean.

Underneath is two more vinyl floors, and then plywood. So that means I can do anything I want--within budget.

Considering I don't have a budget, this is going to be interesting.

So I am looking for suggestions. Whatever it is has to be dark in color--NOT WHITE; I am sick of white because of the cleanliness issues. Whatever it is has to be self-installable, and fairly simple to do so, since it will be my Dad and me installing it. Dad has the knowledge, I just do what I'm told. ;)

Whatever it is has to go fairly well with the old green and cream/tan linoleum in the entry room--that's why I'm thinking dark in color too. Whatever it is has to be strong enough to withstand my dog's drooling tendancies and her claws. And hairballs, etc., from the cats.

So am I dreaming? Mom and Dad have hardwood floors in their kitchen--that is what I would like to have, of course, but that's not going to happen on my teensy non-existant budget.

For reference, the cabinets are medium-brown, the walls are blue. I am thinking that a slate gray color would probably work. Any suggestions?

EDITED to add: I should probably say that my kitchen is huge, like 11' x 16'. The vinyl flooring in the kitchen is also in the laundry room, which used to be part of the kitchen (They installed a wall to separate the 'rooms'. So we're not talking about a teensy little space here at all.

The House of Clutter

I think I should rename my house the Clutter House or something. You see, I am either cursed or blessed with the antique gene--that particular heritage where you never accept the price marked unless, of course, the price marked is fairly close to free. My family was big on antiquing before the word was invented. I grew up living with, eating on, sleeping in, and using antiques.

I have collections of my own, like typewriters, teapots, old books, vintage quilts and fabrics and yarns and clothing--just anything that catches my fancy, really. My Dad has his clocks (over a hundred, with some of them ending up in my house) and his good antiques; I tend to keep my money close and try to spend as little as possible (unless I know it's really a bargain) since I don't have a lot of spending money in the first place.

Soon after I first moved in, my parents' neighbors came to call. They expressed surprise that the house was full already--I think they thought my stuff in the black hole that was Storage wasn't nearly as bad as I made it out to be. But they were right--I had furniture, knicknacks, and stuff (and books) in every room.

It's getting a bit bad lately. I can't turn down a bargain, especially if I have the money and I know it's a bargain. But the stuff is piling up in various rooms around the house, so I'm turning to my old nemesis Ebay again to get rid of some of it--especially the stuff I bought to sell in the first place!

So I'm going to try setting aside one evening a week for ebaying. One evening a week (Wednesday evenings) to post 4-6 auctions, so I can start to get rid of stuff over the fall and winter.

Selling it, of course, will just help my pocketbook recover from all the bargains I've found this year. And, even better, selling this stuff that I can part with will mean more room for other things that I might not want to part with.

No one needs five copper teapots, especially if you don't really like one of them. You know what I mean?

So if anyone reading this happens to like antiques and collectibles, my ebay name is 'jennifer'. Yes, just jennifer. I've been on ebay absolutely forever. I chose my userid the day they changed from your email address to userids, way back when. I really wanted 'jen', but unfortunately, someone beat me to it, so I had to settle for 'jennifer'. But I digress.

Rain!

So far, since last night, we've gotten 3.4 inches of rain. I think we'll hit 4 inches pretty soon here--it's been pouring all day. Who ordered the flood?

My neighbor's house is right beside a culvert that likes to overflow into her basement, and it was a rushing river when I got home today. I also had a rushing river out front along the sidewalk, complete with rapids--it was three inches deep in places. Luckily, my garden just soaks up all that nice water. And the water washed away all the grass I left on the sidewalk after I mowed. Nice!

Not so nice was the fact that the wind blew water all the way under the front porch (okay, not to the wall, but close) so the outside cats' food got a bit wet. One enterprising slug was slurping away at the wet food when I walked outside to dump the bowls. Most of the stuff on the porch is still dry, but the porch swing is soaked--something that had never happened before!

Thank goodness I remembered to close the windows before I left this morning. I had to drive to Columbus (normally a 2 hour drive) in a torrential downpour. Not what I would call fun. :(

Thoughts on the extra rooms in my house

When my sister moves out (which might be next year if she gets her duckies in a row) I will have two free bedrooms as well as the Green Room downstairs--one of the extra rooms in my house.

There are actually two extra rooms in my house that serve no real purpose, other than to add onto the square footage. And my quandary (dry?) is that I'm not quite sure what to do with them once she moves out.

Initially, it will be easy. I'm planning to use the Green Room (which is currently my nephew's toyroom) as a staging room for moving everything from the living room so I can tear down the fake dropped ceiling and paint. Then I will do the same with the dining room stuff, and the same with the entry room stuff, etc, until the downstairs is done.

However, what should I do with it afterwards? And in that same vein, what should I do with the Entry Room as well?

Let's go there first.

You walk through my side door into the Entry Room, which was called the 'breakfast room' when the house was for sale. It is the former kitchen, before the kitchen was added on in the 50s or so. This is the room where I tore up the fake plastic floor and found lovely linoleum underneath. (Its loveliness is debatable, I realize. But I digress.)

Anyway, so I have this rather large room that is too large to be a real mudroom. There is a five foot wide opening on one side that is the entry to the kitchen, a door that leads into the dining room and another door that leads to the basement on the same wall, and then the door that leads into the Green Room after that.

I had intended to stick my free piano in the Entry Room, but now I'm not so sure. Since the kitchen is large enough to be an eat-in kitchen, there's no real reason to put a table in the middle of it and call it a 'breakfast room', and I have a formal dining room already, so I don't need one of those.

This is Mabel's room, too, so it houses her crate and toys. It also houses everything that doesn't quite have a home yet, like my typewriter desk, my hopefully soon-to-be new to me bathroom sink, and other stuff I haven't gotten around to putting away yet.

This is not a great thing to see when you first walk in the door.

I should probably mention that there are no closets at all downstairs. I hide my vacuum cleaner behind my quilt rack. The closest thing to a closet is the laundry room, where we stick all the kitchen stuff that doesn't have a place. Our pantry is stuck in kitchen cabinets and jars displayed on the shelves.

I have been kicking around the idea of actually creating a closet in the entry room. My only issue is that I would have to make it look not stupid; it would have to be something like a built-in or something. There's even a nice rectangle in the floor where something once sat and they didn't put linoleum down. I could put it there, and it could reach all the way up to the ceiling.

Only, that still doesn't address the fact that I don't know what to do with the room itself. Any ideas?

The Green Room is accessible by the living room (via the pocket doors), the hallway (via a door) and it has the door to the bathroom as well. It is also a long room; one of the longer rooms in the house. It is called the Green Room because it is painted a *cough* lovely shade of mint green. Not by me, I swear! Coupled with the beautiful carpet my PO wishes she had taken with her, it was breathtaking, and not in a good way.

At the moment, it is Ethan's toyroom. The cats have their feeding station and two litterboxes in this room as well. The air conditioner is in this room.

When my sister moves out, and with her, all of Ethan's toys, I will have to figure out what to do with this room as well. This is where I'm leaning towards putting the free piano, if it ever gets here. And my Dad suggested that I could move my papasan chair and my mamasan couch to this room, and put something a bit more formal in the living room.

The only problem with that is I need two living rooms less than I need a formal dining room. So I don't think so.

However, I don't want it to be an empty room forever, because I will invariably fill it up with stuff. And I don't want to end up like my PO, really. Honest!

I have toyed with the idea of making the current living room into a library, and moving the TV and couch and stuff into the Green Room, which would make the Green Room the living room, per se. However, since I purged a lot of books, I would really have to buy a lot more books to make a library a viable idea.

I have thought about making some floor-to-ceiling cat trees and giving the Green Room over to the cats and letting that be their room. But then, what do I do about the piano?

I have also thought about buying Mabel a loveseat at Goodwill for the Entry Room, so she can have her own 'couch', since she's not allowed on the furniture otherwise. :)

Other than that, I have no wonderful ideas.

Upstairs is a little easier; one of the free bedrooms will be the spare bedroom. That will probably be Bekah's bedroom. Ethan's bedroom is destined to hold overflow from my office, which will probably end up being fabric. Or, I move all the fabric and sewing machines to Ethan's room and keep everything else in here. I'm not sure about that, though. I'm planning to do the same as downstairs with the upstairs bedrooms--keep one empty and move everything into the empty bedroom while I paint/remove fake dropped ceiling/etc.

I will definitely never run out of space here. Not with all these extra rooms!

Forty years of old letters--from your old house?

My dad went to a yard sale yesterday, where he found three boxes of old letters (from 1900-1940s) that the seller had picked up at an auction some time ago. He brought the letters home, and after I got home from the RenFaire yesterday, we started to look through them.

There are probably hundreds of letters, from Emily Doughty to her betrothed, Walter E. King, from their children (Elizabeth King and Winnifred King) to their Daddy, along with pictures they drew (there's a particular adorable one that Winnie drew of her Daddy in one of the envelopes), Emily's brother George when he went to see the Paris Exposition of 1900 (he thought the World's Fair in Chicago was better, and he saw the Shaw of Persia (I don't think that's how you spell it, but that's how he spelled it) at the opera--he went to see William Tell.

There's one particularly poignant letter that Emily wrote to Walter in which she says that she is really not looking forward to joining him in Cincinnati, because her home in Greenville Tennessee is the only home she has ever known. And that she will miss it terribly, etc., but that she will get over it, because all women getting ready to marry must feel the same.

As far as we can tell, here is the house she spoke of: http://www.bbonline.com/tn/tanasi/index.html

It is a bed and breakfast now, which is cool. The coolest part, though, is the magnolia tree that her father and mother planted on their return from their Cuban honeymoon--the tree that is still living. Colonel John Harrison Doughty was Emily's father as far as we can tell (we have a letter from brother George to his father addressed to Col. John H. Doughty in Greenville, TN and there may be more--I only had an hour or so to look last night after I got back from the RenFaire.) There are programs for operas from 1910, a couple of deeds, letters and postcards, some photos, and bunches of other stuff. It will take a long time to sort through.

This kind of thing is like candy to me--I love finding history and this is definitely history. It is so cool trying to decode the flowery writing, and even more difficult to decode things when they misspell words as well. The letters from Emily's children to their Daddy are just too cute. They really saved everything!

If I came across a box--or even a letter written by one of the long-dead people who once lived in my house, it would be so cool. It would give me a connection with the past, and allow me to reach across the years like nothing else can. (We were speculating what ifs last night--what if George had been on the Titanic, for example? But he wasn't--I can't remember the name of his ship offhand, but I don't think it sank.

Did Emily--or whomever saved all these letters (I'm assuming it was Emily and Walter, because we have both sides of everything--reread these letters? We've found two or three that were mislabeled and never opened. Why weren't they ever opened? What happened to these people? What happened to Lizzie, who wanted to be an artist? What happened to Winnie? Did they grow up and prosper?

It's like finding a stash of old newspapers in the wall of your house, only better. And although the houses in question (because Walter and Emily lived in Hyde Park in Cincinnati--perhaps we can find that house too?) aren't ours, it's still neat.

I thought some of you would feel the same. :)

EDIT: And whew! Dad has been busy. He has a lot more information now!

Ohio Renaissance Festival

I will be at the Ohio Renaissance Festival (selling my books tomorrow, and perhaps with some dolls on the other dates, time depending) on the following dates:

Sept. 9
Sept. 23
Oct. 7
Oct. 22

So if anyone is at the Ohio Renaissance Festival on these dates who sees this, mention that you saw this post in my blog or on livejournal and I will sell you one of my books for half price!