Thursday, March 12, 2009

concord


I would definitely appreciate being in such a sharp, sophisticated place right now. Everything symmetrical and clean, bright white with subtle floral wallpaper and slickly finished wooden floors. I think I'd rather be in a place like this than in the midst of all of the frills of luxury. Ordered and beautiful.

Image Source: Bel Air Residence by Madeline Stuart

Update no. II


Allrighty then, here’s the new digs. I apologize for the messy plan, it’s what came out with my limited skill, lack of measurements, and photoshop. It should give a general idea of how the house is laid out, though.
It was originally built in the early 1930s for my great-great-grandparents. It’s a pretty cute little house, I think in a bungalow-type style. The outside is finished with painted tan stucco, which has held up surprisingly well. Until my great-great-grandmother died (in 1991), it was well kept. Then, it passed to her son Jimmy (who had lived there all of his life), and he didn’t care for it at all. Notoriously dirty, Jimmy didn’t bother to put any work into the place at all, letting it all rot and disintegrate. He died in early 2007, and the house was willed to my mother and her brother.

I went through this morning with my laptop and took some pictures. It feels decidedly odd to be holding a piece of decent technology in these dilapidated surroundings.


From the front door, looking in at the den.

Like I said, we stripped up all of the carpet. The place feels about a hundred times cleaner now.



From the dining room, looking back at the den.


The dining room. It’s hard to get a good picture of it, especially since my webcam camera can’t exactly zoom in and out.


Dining Room wall, and Jimmy’s bedroom door.


Here’s the Kitchen. It’s not a bad layout, and it looks about a hundred times cleaner than it did when I first got here.


Because you don’t get the full experience until you see the floor.


Here’s one end of the back porch. That is the old freezer (it’s rusting horribly), my dorm fridge which my parents are using, a large green broken refrigerator, and a broken washing machine. The dryer works though, yay.


And here’s the other end of the back porch, aka my future room (yippee! …). Right now, I kip in the den.


To start on the other side of the house, this is the bathroom. This is after a lot of scrubbing.


Cabinet over the bathtub.


Jimmy’s room from the door. I’m a bit scared to venture further.


There! See? a foot or two further inside. That paneling is the cheapiest crud ever, and must be taken care of.


Master bedroom.


It was hard to get a good angle on this. The rooms are too small to see all of except with about ten pictures, and I have no desire to get that much of an eyeful of this place.

It looks bad now (worse than in the pictures, actually), but I do think this place has some potential. I like some of the details, like the pretty doors and the ceilings.


I’ve been brainstorming some ways to improve this place, and those will follow, hopefully with better pictures. Until then, though, my goal is to get it clean.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Update no. I

I apologize for the lack of posting around here. The archives should look right, but I actually haven’t posted since February 28th. School and life decided to call and kick me in the face a few times, and I’ve been wrapped up in that. I’m currently on Spring Break (I’m a junior at college), so I have enough time to update here.

It looks like I’ll be doing some decorating work of my own, albeit unintentionally. Through a series of unhappy events, my parents’ house was foreclosed on and they moved out. No place to go, really, except for this broken-down place that once belonged to my mother’s great-uncle. He died a few years back, and the house passed to my mother and her brother. Once, it would never have been considered an option to live in. It’s grungy, decrepit, and out in the middle of nowhere. It’s where we are now, like it or not.

I wish I had gotten some pictures from the start. As soon as I got out of school, I headed to my new house, where my parents had conveniently arrived the night before. I didn’t have a camera, only my MacBook, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to dig it out. My parents had tried to prep me for the sight by telling me to imagine the worst. I have been to this house before, when I was only about 8 or 9 years old, and the whole place is shrouded in bad memories. I walked in expecting the ceilings to be falling in and the floors to cave if I walked too briskly—it wasn’t quite so bad. But…. it was filthy. Junk everywhere. Mice had infested this place not long ago, and the corners were still blackened from them. The seventies yellow-green molded carpet smelled sharply of gas. Mold covered the doors and walls. There was absolutely no clean surface; as soon as you touched anything, you wanted to scrub with alcohol. In the kitchen, the ceiling tiles, heavy with a leak in the ceiling, had disintegrated and fallen over the whole room. Dirty dishes still piled in the old, stained sink. Bottles of grease cluttered the surface of the broken stove. Over every surface smeared a greasy, brown residue. This is where I started.

Armed with black trash bags, I went through the kitchen and flung out everything that wasn’t nailed down. Mice had been here, too, everywhere, even inside the drawers. There were still cans of vegetables and meat in the cabinets, some of which had popped the metal lids out. I threw it all away, trying not to think about it, holding my breath. When this was done, I made the first clean surface in the house by scrubbing out the sink with bleach.

Over the next couple of days, my dad ripped out the carpet from the dining room, the den, and the master bedroom. The surface underneath is pine, I think. It looks like someone polished the outer edges, and left what was under a rug bare. Since the owners grew up in the depression (and this is Arkansas), we think they were being frugal and didn’t polish except what would be seen. The boards were coated in staples, tacks, dirt and mold. We got all of it up, though, and the boards beneath are ugly but bleached clean. I went over all of the walls and molding with Clorox, leaving the paint looking decidedly less green than before. I don’t care at all how much damage it will do to things by bleaching them—better destroyed than hazardous.

The gas doesn’t work anymore. The tank had a leak in it, so we just turned it off and capped off the pipes. I like that better, anyway—the smell is horrible, and I’ll never get used to it. So there’s no heat, and no hot water. Power hasn’t been as big of an issue as I feared; only two-pronged plugs, but enough power that we haven’t shorted out anything yet. The refrigerator, microwave, and oven are all shot. There’s one bathroom in this house, and nothing in it functioned. My dad spent the first two days reassembling the toilet and sink, and now they actually sort of work. I’m looking forward to getting a hot water heater. The bathtub has no showerhead, either.

Right now, my priority is to empty the house of filth. We’ve gotten the kitchen, dining room, den, master bedroom, and most of the kitchen done (in three days). That leaves the small bedroom, the back porch (which has been enclosed), and the bathroom. The small bedroom belonged to my uncle, and it holds the worst of the filth. Piles of his old belongings and dirty clothes litter every surface. It’s revolting, and I think I want to purchase some kind of mask so that I don’t toxify and die, so to speak. After all of these are done (maybe by the end of this week), I can start to make this place less of an eyesore.

onyx


It would feel incredibly glamorous to come sweeping down this staircase. It’s a stunning piece, leading the eyes up and away from the deeply polished black floor. And here’s another example of the zebra rug; here, it compliments the white stripe running the stairs. If I really wanted to feel like a celebrity, this is where I would want to be.

Image Source: Brentwood Estate. Design by Kelly Wearstler

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

creamery


I’d definitely becoming a fan of this type of open shelving instead of cabinets. I doubt it would work for me at the moment, though—my dishes are a conglomeration of all different patterns and colors, and it wouldn’t be a very unified display. Not that this is inherently bad, but a mostly monochrome silhouette would be much more stunning in my opinion. Here, the patterns are subtle enough to keep the effect. It looks splendid together with the pale yellow wall, marble countertops, and creamy cabinets. A kitchen this cheerful is a treasure.

San Francisco Kitchen by DeMattei & Wade