Little Break

Hey, y'all :) We hope to have several more house projects knocked out within the next two to three weeks! It looks like we may be able to put the six new doors in the upstairs hall, paint them black!, finish the trim in Punkin and Shug's bedroom, and finish up one more quarter of the kitchen cabinets. I'm super excited! Lots happening! With school getting underway, too, though - there's just no time to post regularly. Home for the Better is going to need to rest a little.

BUT, when I come back, I should have some more thoughts on Design Elements and some fun pics to share! Be looking for us!!!

XO,
Jacci

Coming to Terms... Layering

This photo is single-handedly responsible for my nearly constant urge to jump the gun and decorate this house. After this weekend, though, I've come to terms with one simple fact - this house needs its design foundation first.

Its First Layer of sorts.

Plenty of professional designers will say "inspiring" things like, "Finish the entire room before you move on to the next. Otherwise, you'll spend all this time and money and what will you have to show for it?" I actually spoke with a local interior designer a few weeks back that said exactly that. PROBLEM: Many of my rooms are ugly. If I stick with just one room until it is completely finished - from paint down to the details on the end tables - I'll have one gorgeous room after a year, but the other TEN rooms will still look like crud. That does not sound like a happy plan to me.

The more I think of it, the more I am confident that we need to approach this house in layers. Over a recent family vacation, I read Bunny Williams' Point of View. Dynamite book. One of the chapters is entitled, "Layering", and in it Ms. Williams explains how to approach the development of a lived in look over time. That's what I want. That's what this house needs to become a home... our home.

Layering.

So, what is the first layer to entail? What does this house need most to get it on solid footing design wise? (We aren't knocking out walls here - this is a cosmetic plan, not a complete overhaul). What does this house need? Well, if we're talking about first things first (and we are), it needs paint. It needs trim. It needs flooring. It needs doors. It needs lighting fixtures. It needs window treatments.

The first layer.

As much as I want to go out and buy thrift store tables that I can spray paint and find steals like $5 silver plated mint julip cups - I need to focus on getting this first layer in place. Paint, trim, floors, lights, door, windows. I'm still flipping through the House Beautifuls and Elle Decors of this world (the ones that are left, anyway) to gather inspiration, but the second and third layer ideas are in a holding bin. If I stick to this layering plan fairly faithfully, we should be well on our way to a completely new house within about 2 years. That's a crazy long time to wait to accessorize a room, isn't it? But, I'm going to try hard to hold off.

I think in the long run it will be a far more satisfying and encouraging approach. I suppose only time will tell.

Have a great one!

XO,
Jacci

P.S. Many, many thanks to Sherry for validating my new direction. She's a rock star, y'all. Go check out her blog!

If you take your baseboards off...

... you'll want to remember that the door stop is gone, too.

Man.

Lumberyard and a Movie

That's probably what all of you do for a date these days, isn't it? Lumberyard, dinner, movie - pretty standard, I'd say.

Tuesday night, my dear parents came down to watch the children while Sam and I hit the local Carter's lumber looking for trim. We're replacing it in the children's bedrooms, and whatever we decide on is planned for the entire house. It's a fairly major expense overall and an important one, too, considering that this trim will be in every single room.

Although Lowe's is undoubtedly our go-to shop for late night home improvement runs, we like to support the little guy when we can. We decided to try Carter's Lumber first, just to see if we could find what we needed. They looked at us a little strangely when we walked in dressed for dinner...

... and sportin' a camera.

In the end, Carter's didn't have anything like what we wanted. Well, we tried. Sam works close to a Home Depot and he had scoped out their selection on his lunch hour. He thought there were possibly a few options to think about. So, it was off to Home Depot.

Great date so far! :)

We spent what seemed like a very long time deliberating about this and that trim. See, we're trying to choose wordwork and trim that add character to the house without making it feel completely contrived and like something just doesn't fit in. One of our biggest non-negotiables was a wider baseboard - something between 4 and 5 inches wide. The pickin's were slim. Beyond that, we're totally replacing all of the trim around the doors as well, and we needed to choose door trim that would gel with the new baseboards. Sounds simple, but it wasn't. We decided that we really needed to get a more concrete idea of what we wanted, and also some food. Wifey was getting hungry.

At Olive Garden, Sam busted out some scrap paper and we started drawing more or less what we were envisioning.

Sam was a very good sport about my camera :)

He humors me.

He even poses, too :) Isn't he a looker? Anyway, we drew it up and agreed on what we wanted. Now, making it happen? That often proves to be a different story.

At our beloved Lowe's, we decided to take advantage of the great reference books available (for sale, technically, but we just flipped through a few). Well, actually, no we didn't. We sat on the floor in an out of the way aisle and studied them like college kids. They were very useful :)

Still, after all of that, we couldn't quite make it all work with the lumber available. It eventually became clear that we were going to need a table saw to do this thing right. Sam's in the market for one now. We're also looking for crown moulding that is less than 2" wide. We were surprised that it's not readily available. The Lowe's Man recommended that we contact the cabinet department about a special order for decorative cabinet crown. That just sounds pricey, doesn't it? We're thinking we might need to head back over to Carter's and check out the crown there.

So, we didn't buy a thing - not even the book. We did head over to late showing of Julie & Julia, though. Loved the "Julia" parts, not so much the "Julie" parts. And there really was some very unnecessary crude language. We were hoping it was a good, clean fun movie. It easily could have been, but that's Hollywood for ya. Merrill Streep was great, but the overall movie was so-so in my opinion. Sam and I had a great night, though, even without buying trim. We used to joke that even our fanciest dates always ended up with a quick run to Wal-Mart. Maybe we've entered a new stage - maybe now our dates will always have that quick-run-into-Lowe's element.

As long as I'm with my man, it's all the same :)