I had a vision. It was a vision of soft greige walls and soft charcoal sofas flanking the fireplace. It was going to be cozy, like being wrapped up in a cashmere blanket… and then I woke up. I was alone in my vision. John “didn’t see it”. The boys, just shook their heads at me. How could they not see it, I cried out into the wilderness??? It was beautiful, it was cozy, it was my vision… I knew what I’d do, I’d go back to the paint store (I knew we should have bought stock in Benjamin Moore) to find the perfect greige that everyone could agree upon, but alas, it was to no avail. I was still alone with my vision.

Do you like it here or there? I do not like it here or there, I do not like it anywhere…

Living Room Wall

Dining Room Wall

Kitchen Wall: Part 1

Kitchen Wall: Part 2

What to do, what to do? I was starting to panic. How could I come up with a totally new vision at this, the eleventh hour??? Aha… a light bulb. I have a friend who is a designer with a superb sense of color. If anyone could help me, it was she. Our conversation went something like this… “Well Kendra, of course you could do greige, it is very on trend right now (naturally!), but it will give you a decidedly contemporary feeling. Didn’t you say that you were going for more of a farmhouse sensibility?” Darn it, why does she have to be so logical? Suffice it to say that in about five minutes she had me straightened out and we had new paint colors selected.

I had sort of gotten stuck with the idea that the four connected spaces needed to be the same color. She assured me that this is not the case. as long as the colors have the same “feeling”, for lack of a better word, they can live happily side by side. So there you have it. The living room will be soft green with oatmeal sofas flanking the fireplace. The dining room and kitchen will be soft blue, which doesn’t exactly jive with the current gold color scheme, but will work beautifully with my “someday” kitchen. And the entry will be soft taupe, once we can peel off the omnipresent wallpaper.

Living Room

Dining Room

Kitchen

Entry

Another crisis averted… the only thing left to do is paint…

The other thing that they never tell you about downsizing is… if you downsize, they will come. For us that means we started with three people living with us, we downsized, we still have three people living with us.

There is not much chance that my daughter Alyssa will be moving in with us any time soon. She is happily married and has two children of her own.

My son Connor is a sophomore in college this year, so he has a legitimate reason to be living with us.

So who are the two additional mystery guests??? They are my college graduate son Ian and his college graduate girlfriend Kaitlyn, who are living with us while they prepare to attend grad school next year. Don’t get me wrong… I LOVE having a full house… I am just enjoying the irony.

That truly is another reason why we chose this house. It has two bedrooms (for the kids) and an office (for John) downstairs and two more bedrooms upstairs, one for us and one which is acting as our dressing room/closet at the moment (yes, we’re spoiled… but, no, we’re living in a gold house… I take that back). Wait a minute, I thought we were downsizing. Well… that’s the other secret, you always need more space than you think you do, so you have to downsize just right. There’s actually an art to it.

The actual square footage is not significantly different between the house we left and the house we’re in now, but strangely, it is still smaller. I think it has to do with some number magic in the way they calculate square footage. The difference actually lies in the number and type of rooms. We no longer have a separate family room, playroom over the garage, or fully finished basement. We could always expand into the attic someday, if need be, but we are supposed to be downsizing, people!!!

The third and final secret (at least for this post) is that when you downsize, you will end up with TOO MUCH FURNITURE! Not really much of a secret you say? Well it certainly has me stymied. I just thought we would move in and furniture would magically find a new place to live. There’s that magic at work again… I’m afraid much of it is going to end up living in our attic. (Here’s a little shout out to the inventor of attics… thank you from me and all my downsizing brethren). And I will do as countless generations have done before me… save it for the children to have someday.

While the floors are being done, we are essentially kicked out of the house, meaning that we need to turn our attention outdoors. John wisely chose painting. I chose to attack the aforementioned shrubs. Eight years of inattention has given our shrubs a feeling of entitlement… they are large and in charge.

They are really nothing more than Yew bushes, Cedar trees, Rhododedrons, and Mountain Laurels gone wild. I show them no mercy.

I was very motivated to get those monsters away from the house and most especially the windows. From the inside it is somewhat claustrophobic. I am actually pretty amazed at the size of the branches and trunks that I was able to get through with my loppers. Did I mention that I was motivated? By the end of the weekend I left no shrub standing. (One caveat: the Rhododendron and Mountain Laurel were ruthlessly pruned and saved for future transplanting.)

I am amazed by the difference! We have an actual front facade to the house (unfortunately still gold) which includes both a porch and a front door… who knew?

The sad ending to this tale is that the shrubs had the last laugh… somewhere in and amongst their branches was hiding an even darker enemy… poison ivy… but I don’t get poison ivy… correction, you do now. Just a spot inside my elbow at first, no big deal, I wasn’t even convinced that it really was poison ivy. Then it spread down my arm, to my other arm, to my leg, to my other leg, to the point where I thought my best course of action might be to physically remove my skin from my body. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I called my internist who took pity on me with a prescription for Prednisone. Now at long last, both the shrubs and the poison ivy are a distant memory.

So… how do you live when you are doing major renovations to your new home? First, you send your late teens/early twenties sons and girlfriend (more on that later) off to stay with friends (thank you friends). Next, you decide that a mattress on the floor will be just fine… indefinitely. And last, but by no means least, you leave your sanity at the door.

Why oh why would you choose to stay in a hotel, when staying at the house keeps you so much closer to the action? As Cary Grant says in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (best movie ever), “Just a private joke between me and whoever my analyst is going to be.”

It all started like this… you will remember that this is a gold house inside and out, with carpeting in some unusual places, and that we stripped off all of the carpeting… so naturally the plan is to replace the carpeting (oh and some questionable tile as well) with new hardwood floors and new tile. While all this was going on, we decided to set up house in one of the two out buildings, which I call the little house and the shed, and John simply calls outhouses… anyway… the little house was lovingly set up (by me) to be our temporary home during the renovation process.

We never actually spent a night in the little house. John convinced me that a mattress on the floor inside the house would work out better in the long run. First stop: we moved into the dining room and our cats moved into what would someday be our bedroom upstairs. That worked fine until the workmen who needed access to the dining room arrived.

For reasons that are still somewhat of a mystery to me, we then chose to move into the first floor master bedroom (with a non-functional bathroom) on the dusty subfloor where carpeting had been removed and to bring the cats, their food and water, and their litter box in with us. If anyone ever suggests to you that this is a pleasant or necessary way to live… I recommend that you quickly run the other way!

Our only salvation at this point was that the upstairs floors were being sanded, stained, and polyurethaned while we were down there. Once the final coat had had a chance to cure (which takes about an eternity), we moved upstairs to OUR room. Oh joy… oh wait… the cats are moving with us too. Would this torment never end? Disclaimer: I love our cats immensely, but I do not love sharing a single living space with them.

And although I have complained about this set up, I have to share with you that being upstairs, in our room, on the mattress, on the floor, felt like heaven to me. Finally the downstairs floors are done (second eternity… is that even possible?), and we move in some actual furniture (and the angels sang). I have never felt so pampered as the first night in a very long time that we spent back in our bed.

In 1971, open concept didn’t exist… so we have a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen all separated by walls and doors. This might have been de rigueur in 1971, but it is simply not the way we are used to living in 2014. Something’s gotta give. Contractor? I don’t need no stinkin’ contractor. I’ve got a husband and a couple of sledgehammers. What more could I possibly need?

I have to admit… once you start swinging a sledgehammer, it can be hard to stop. We had a nice little division of labor going. I took out my frustrations on the kitchen cabinets, and John did pretty much everything else. Does that say something about which one of us could benefit more from therapy… I’ll let you be the judge.

My side

His side(s)

At this juncture I feel it may be necessary to mention a couple of things: 1) My husband is a ham and 2) Yes! We are living here!!! Now who needs the therapy???

One more (half) wall done

And the walls came tumbling down

Oops! Has anyone seen John?

It’s August 1st 2014. It’s moving day. Are we moving in furniture and decorating our surroundings? No… we are not. We have three days to accomplish the following: Remove the carpeting from the master bedroom, first floor hallway, second floor hallway, back hallway, stairs, and sunroom, and in the what were they thinking category, the kitchen and laundry room.

Now, I have removed carpeting before, but nothing on this scale, so I trot down to my local hardware store (soon to be renamed, my salvation) and ask about implements of destruction for carpeting. I am shown something that looks like a combination of a dagger and a scimitar. It’s new name? My BFF. It rips through carpeting like buttah. I have never been happier.

The stairs look refreshed!

The fruits of our labor

P.S. We made it with time to spare which is a good thing because we had approximately one billion staples left to remove before Monday, as well as two walls and all the baseboards… But that’s another story.

I believe I mentioned that our home was built in 1971, but what I failed to mention was not only that Harvest Gold was a very popular color choice in the 70’s, but that it must also have been a personal favorite of the builder/original owner of our home. Just about anything that could be gold, is gold. And if it is in fact your favorite color, then there is absolutely no reason to change it for the next 43 years. Right? Right!

A few of my favorites:

The siding (Don’t even get me started about those shrubs!)

The kitchen

The bathroom

The decor

So what do you do when you are surrounded by Harvest Gold? You remove what you can and you learn to love the rest… and you call it “vintage”.