Palate Freshener

I have nothing to say because I am very busy slash exhausted but I wanted to replace the saga of my toilet paper issues as the most recent post.

News bulletin: the grody old memory foam slippers that I love so much because they cushion the pounding my knees take on these concrete slab/ceramic tile floors have lost their grooves and ridges on the soles so now when I try to get up out of a chair they slide on the smooth floor and make it much harder to gain upright balance.

That was a 64 word sentence. Did it make you forget about toilet paper issues? No? Then how about an image of a satanic canine and the aforementioned slippers themselves:

I took this picture while I was trying to decide if it was worth it to get up off of the sofa or not. From now on all pics are going to be posted unedited because Apple wants me to buy more icloud storage and I’m not going to so they are making it hard to save photo edits.

Old and grody yes- some might even say shangad  – but these are good for dragging around on the sandy patio pavers in the morning while I examine each leaf of my potted plants or for taking the garbage cans up and down the driveway.

Forget yet? No? Well then in other old news, this is what the new guest room looks like nowadays:

We stripped the bedding to get ready to change the temporary plywood bed platform to the permanent metal one, so that was the signal to start cramming unwanted items from other places into here. Lucky for us there are enough rooms in this house that we can sit and look at a different messy vista very day of the week.

Not only did I not finish what I started to do in there, but now we’ve begun turning the bedroom next door to be a small den, suitable for TV viewing and doing needlepoint. Step one – move stuff out so you have room enough to maneuver in a 10′ x 12′ room that still has a book case and a vintage typewriter table in the middle of it. So now the new guest room is a mess (again) and the former baby room is a mess (still).

Please come back tomorrow for an exciting recitation of how many decorative fan pulls I studied before I settled on this one to coordinate with the beachy colors I’m going to use in this room.  I’m thinking of titling that entry as Going Coastal: Stand Back 200 Feet.

UPDATE Update to Yesterday’s Bedroom 2 Redo Post

See: It’s Not Going Well.

UPDATE: Well, it is and it isn’t. Giving up the vintage orchid lamp as the central design element of the guest room changed everything. Once I put in the old Ethan Allen lamp that used to be in my formal Queen Anne-style parlor in NJ, the whole character of the room changed. Even with only that one lamp in it, the vibe went from Craigslist Hodgepodge to Elegant Assemblage .

I guess I really loved my early 90’s self  then – or at least my early 90’s design sensibility – because I saved a lot of that stuff during the Great Interstate Clutter Purge of ’16 as we prepared to move to Florida. Now that the lamp is there, I can use a small side chair covered in a matching fabric for the desk  and I can hang the two sizable botanical rose prints that  Sami bought from The Bombay Company for two different anniversaries. I even have a small ceramic tray that matches the lamp base. I just couldn’t let this stuff go even though they have been stored in a closet ever since we got here. I must really have missed it.

It’s like you move 1200 miles away and leave your cat behind and then a year later the cat shows up at your new home and you realize what a gap there’s been in your life.

Cat lovers please do not email me with threats and insults. I know that your beloved cats are not the same as inanimate objects. I’M JUST SAYING.

Anyway, I think I can still use the crocheted things and burlap things I have collected as accessories. Don’t panic – I won’t over do them . They’ll bring some informality to what is shaping up to be this new  decor genre I just invented – Elegant But Thrifty Assemblage Of Cast Offs That Look A Lot Better Than You Think They Would.

On the other hand, the foundation for the new mattress is still held prisoner in the UPS receiving center in Jacksonville. What a mess UPS is! The many customer service people that Sami and I spoke to over the course of yesterday afternoon and evening revealed that this location has been having problems since Black Friday and although our package has been there since 12/15, we probably won’t see it until 1/15 at the earliest. Three things that add to the aggravation here:

• Every day, the UPS tracking website says the delivery is scheduled for today. Stop telling me that if we all know it isn’t true.
• I did get a small light package yesterday delivered by UPS. Dudes, everybody would like to cherry pick the easy work if they could – where is my 37 pound bed support?
• Every single package that came to me via FedEx came exactly on time with no fuss and no problem. So it can be done IF YOU’RE ORGANIZED AND PREPARED.

I”m telling you this because Sami has hatched a grand plan to create a 2 x 4 and plywood  platform to use temporarily so that we can unfurl the compressed memory foam mattress. He’s been gone to Home Depot for about 3 hours now, never a good sign.

I was hoping this would be an easy thing to finish so that the mattress has enough time to resume its shape and shake off its stink. Looks like we are going to run into overtime as darkness falls, and that the best scenario we can hope for today.

3:00 pm UPDATE UPDATE:

Welp, there it is. Our California visitors no longer have to worry about having to sleep on a cold tile floor for Christmas and can now relax and enjoy coast-to-coast holiday air travel and all that it entails.

Good news – there’s no stink to this mattress and it seems to be mostly puffed up already. The papers that were tucked inside the packaging say to give it 24-48 hours to fully puff up so we now have that luxury, thanks to Sami who spent half of today (his birthday) working on this. Frankly, I know that he was secretly very pleased about this because now he has an additional $62.00 worth of wood to add to his hoard. He’s been lobbying to Frankenstein some shelving together for the shed so he can retain all of his garage hoard but I’ve been successfully holding him off in favor of keeping the shed mostly clear for hurricane storage. He tipped his hand today and now there’s nothing I can do about it.

So happy birthday, Sami you lovable old hoarder, you.

 

 

 

It’s Not Going Well. Not Well At All.

Things are not going according to plan with my guest room project. In fact, it reeks of failure:

•  the paint color is blah
• the orchid lamp looked insignificant and lost so I switched it out for a taller lamp that I brought from NJ
• I ran out of time to white wash the  bargain night stand
• the new mattress is here but the new foundation has been riding around on a UPS truck since last Friday
• I don’t think the desk that I built the whole design theme around is going to look good in here.

On the plus side:

• the carpeting cleaned up nicely and looks brand new
• the Craigslist headboard looks better than I thought it would
• the design on that lamp allows me to hang the old Redouté  roses pictures I’ve been storing in a closet and have been kind of missing. (You remember – the one that tried to assassinate me in my sleep) But even so, my whole design plan is in tatters now.

The guests for this guest room arrive in the wee small hours of Dec 23rd after a long multi-leg flight from California, so I’m banking on the fact that they won’t care what the room looks like as long as they can stretch out and go to sleep.

I’m disappointed in myself.

UPDATE – I AM ALSO DISAPPOINTED IN UPS AND WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT FEDEX MANAGED TO DELIVER EVERY PACKAGE ON TIME AND I DO NOT APPRECIATE HAVING AN OVERSEAS CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE READ A SCRIPT TO ME BECAUSE THAT IS NOT A SERVICE IT IS A PLAN TO PLACATE ME WHICH DID NOT WORK.

Despite a Long History of Evidence to the Contrary, I Have Faith That My Instincts Are Good About This.

I’m wracked with doubt about this project. Why did I ever paint over the sophisticated color palette that was in the guest room to start with? I’m telling myself that this was the right thing to do because

a. the room is on the north side of the house and gets less natural light than the other side and

b. the brown accent wall had the room’s only window and the contrast between dark wall and outside opening was hard on the eyes.

c. I’m going for vintage tranquility and other worldness not modern reality no matter how sophisticated it is. I want my guests to be in special place that is different from their daily surroundings.

That last one sounded pretty good, didn’t it? I’m just not in love with my choice here. Maybe these two framed prints I ordered this week will give me back my confidence: 

They add an air of tranquility and other worldliness don’t they? I dithered around so long about what size would be right that when I finally did order them, I don’t know if I got big ones or small ones. I guess we’ll all be surprised.

From our Department of Melting Credit Cards, I ordered a queen-sized foundation and mattress. From Walmart. (!) It’s one of those gel-topped memory foam things that comes all compressed and you have to set it free of the packaging to get it to resume its footprint. Although these two things were ridiculously inexpensive, we slept on this mattress at my sister’s house when we evacuated for the hurricane in September. It was extremely comfortable and we didn’t sink down into the foam during the night creating that awful I can’t turn over feeling of some other memory foam mattresses I have known.

It’s not as quite crazy as it sounds, buying a cheap mattress from Walmart. I know somebody who spent thousands on a genuine Therapedic brand mattress and within 3 months, her husband’s side of the memory foam compressed by 60%. The company told her this is a known issue that happens to 30% of the mattresses they sell. So  if my mattress compresses I’ll get it replaced or if its out of warranty, spend another $300 to replace it and I’m still ahead of the game. Also, this is the guest room so it’s not like someone will be sleeping on it every night. Even though I make this compelling argument to common sense, I’m not 100% settled about this decision either.

And so with 2 iffy decisions niggling at me, I feel that I must tell you that I’m now obsessed with this STUNNING MAJOLICA GREEN PORCELAIN BUNNY RABBIT LAMP W/NEW SHADE AND WOOD BASE. It doesn’t even make sense for what I was planning to do in there, but i just have the sense that it will really be the standout time in a room where everything was chosen to stand out.

 The front and the sides are good too but this angle is my favorite. The bunny part is only 8″ of the total 17″ height.  I admit that it is a ridiculous asking price but hey I saved all that money by getting a Walmart mattress,  so …

 

Redecoratin’ 2: Bedroom Boogaloo

The race to have a guest room before the Christmas guests get here is on. Considering that it takes us an average of 5 weeks to get through a project, prospects look dim at the moment.

The room formerly known as “the little TV room” has been emptied out, stripped down and taped off and is ready for paint. I spent a long time looking for the perfect shade of cream to coat the walls of what I was planning to be a decor theme of “Quaint Cottage Style“. But when I looked at the accumulation of the things I’ve amassed so far, the theme has actually turned out to be “Looks Like It Came From Craigslist“. Which it did, more or less. Once I realized that, I was free to abandon the cream idea and go with Behr Country Linens for the wall color. (Look familiar?)

This room was the guest room before we bought the house.

Once we got here, we turned it into a den-like TV room. It was roomy and comfortable and it was where I was set up to do my needlepoint. But the former baby room next door was too small to be a comfortable guest room, so we had to rethink. We sold the big comfy sofa last week, jammed the remaining stuff into the baby room temporarily and here we are today:

Time is short and we aren’t 25 anymore so the going will be slow. We’re aiming for painted walls, cleaned carpeting and a place to sleep by the time the first guests arrive.  The frills will have to come later.

Psych! I have plenty of frills all lined up and ready to be deployed. What do you think I’ve been doing all this time if not scouring Craigslist, the local Nextdoor and Facebook Marketplace sites, second hand shops and antique centers? And by antique centers, I mean consignment shops where villains slop chalk paint onto good old wooden furniture. Here’s what I have so far:

• an off-white federal style secretary. perfect as it is
• a bamboo side chair which I was told came from a furniture sale at the nearby Ritz -Carlton resort. I believe it. It’s the most elegant thing in the room.
• a badly damaged maple wood colonial night stand which I was planning to paint off-white but now I’m thinking metallic gold. Seriously.
• a colonial head board. I want to tell you that it’s maple wood but it has a very plastic-y vibe to it. I don’t know.
• an off-white wicker arm chair
• a bridge lamp with a beaded shade.
• a latex orchid in a marigold glass creamer.
• a small braided rug basket to hold bottled water.
• a small rectangular bamboo table in a dull gray. I might paint that metallic gold, too.
• 3 (or 5) vintage Modern Orchid plates as wall decor.

So that’s a start. I need a wall clock, some art work and maybe another lamp. Oh, did I mention that I’ll be using the Modern Orchid lamp in that room?

How does it all sound? Like random Craiglist ads? I think it’s all going to come together very nicely.

I really do.