Cottage Living: Liking My House

I've spent much of this week philosophizing about education over at Saint Dan's. Sometimes I think it's overkill to have these separate blogs -- at this writing I have four. One's for my Usborne book business; one's dedicated to high-school English; Saint Dan's is intended to motivate me to keep a regular homeschooing log, though other homeschooling-related stuff goes there as well; and then there's this one, which is catch as catch can. I think of it as my family/culture/variety blog, and sometimes homeschooling bleeds over into it, too, as that's both a family concern and a cultural issue. This is the magazine I'd buy at the newsstand, the magazine about poetry and food and children and home and life in general, the magazine of what I'm thinking about.

I don't often buy magazines. We subscribe to several of the religion-and-culture sort, so if I'm in the mood to read a magazine, that's what I read, because there it is on the coffee table and all. But this week, in addition to asking myself, "What is education?" I also had to go to the grocery store, and while I was at the grocery store, I broke down and bought this month's Cottage Living.

Cottage Living is about the only magazine of this kind that I can stand to buy. I long ago gave up buying beauty and fashion magazines, because they only made me hate myself, and I mostly eschew lifestyle and home magazines for the same reason. The last thing in the world I need is to foment discontent within myself. Or envy, either. I'm quite good enough at these things on my own, thank you. But I like Cottage Living. Admittedly, the whole "cottage" thing -- the small-but-exquisite-lifestyle thing -- can make my teeth hurt if I ingest too much of it at once, but in small doses it's all right.

And actually, rather than making me hate my house, the effect of reading this magazine is generally to make me remember what I like about it. It's compact. It's unprepossessing. It demands of us some creative uses of space. It's a simple house with some appealing details, a plain house which, with some creativity, can blossom into charm.

I need help thinking these things, especially now when the laundry's backlogged, and detritus is starting to pile up in corners, and everything outside is gray. I need motivation to tidy and purge; but I also need reminding what I like about this space, because at this time of year, and in the mood I'm in, moving -- or possibly just blowing up the house and building another one right here -- appeals to me greatly. Actually, it's possible that we will be moving. Aelred goes in February for an interview for what's at least the most promising and attractive job possibility to come down the pike in five years, and the prospect has me online house-cruising in spite of myself. It also means that we may need to shift into overdrive in finishing the facelift on this house; on the other hand, we might as well do it anyway, so that we can stay put happily, if that's what we're meant to do.

So: this house, and what I like about it. Ever since I read Crunchy Cons and Rod Dreher's rather sniffy dismissal of 1950's tract houses, I have wanted to stand up for the 1950's tract house. Actually, I agree with him wholeheartedly about the appeal of the Craftsman bungalow and the front-porch neighborhood, but in our town the Craftsman-bungalow-front-porch-neighborhoods either are way out of the budget we had to work with two years ago or are also drive-by-shooting neighborhoods.

So we went with the postwar subdivision instead. I grew up in this part of town, in a larger and much more custom-built late-50's ranch house, and I have a fondness for both the environs and the ranch house itself. In many ways, these later houses are the next generation of the bungalow type -- they aren't entirely, of course, being designed for air-conditioning, cars and commuting, and a level of personal privacy which was still a new luxury when my parents and their friends were setting up housekeeping in the late '50's and early '60's. But in other ways, they fit the same type: planned neighborhoods, houses close together and mass-produced to meet a demand. In their construction, too, the two generations of houses are not unlike. After World War II, plaster walls did give way to gypsum wallboard, as I discovered in stripping wallpaper in my entrance hall last summer; still, floors are mostly hardwood, or a combination of wood and tile, and therefore more or less indestructible (or at least restoration-worthy), and there's woodwork to speak of, crown moldings and chair rails and window frames which, while not quite approaching the artisanship of the millwork in a real Craftsman house, still reflects an era when natural materials were cheap and available, and builders could afford something like craftsmanship in their houses.

Like cottages of earlier generations, these houses also tend to have smallish rooms -- our largest living space measures roughly 12'x 21' -- low-ish ceilings, and narrow-ish windows. They have the same advantages -- coziness, compactness, dearth of wasted space -- and the same disadvantages -- dark, claustrophobic, easily cluttered.

I didn't fall in love with our house at first sight. Its previous owner was a bachelor, who had bought it from his college roommate when the roommate got married, and if I say that the walls and ceiling of the master bath were heavily dappled with mildew, and that there was what we now recognize to have been a flying-squirrel skeleton in the leaf-clogged vent pipe above the stove, that will give you some idea. Furthermore, there was white linoleum in the entrance hall -- very fetching, that, with two-toned taupe-and-navy-blue walls; the effect was something like a spectator pump, only more so -- carpeting, which I loathe on principle, in what's now our common living area, and more dark-taupe paint on the walls of that room and all the bedrooms. My overall impression of the house, which I had liked very much from the outside, was one of general grime and gloom. I almost didn't go back to look at it a second time, and up to and maybe even after the closing I entertained deep doubts. Did we really want to live here?

Buying the house and doing deferred-maintenance work -- first of all it needed a new roof, like yesterday -- exhausted our budget, and all we could do for the first year and a half in the way of interior renovation was to rip things out and otherwise arrange what we had in such a way as to make things work. One challenge was the red dining room, which I now love, as I believe I have said maybe sixty to a hundred times since beginning this blog, but which took some getting used to, to put it mildly. I really, really wanted to paint it, but I couldn't buy paint. All I could do was to look at things I owned -- furniture, linens, artwork, knick-knacks -- to see what might complement the intensity of the walls. Here's how one corner turned out:



I like the idea of a dining-room-library, so most of our walls in this room have bookcases. Books look good in a red room; I'm not sure why this is so, but it is. This bookcase was built by my grandfather from an old kitchen cabinet, and it's extremely heavy. Someday maybe I'll feel like painting it, but all my life it's been the same white, with the inside painted gray-green, and this has worked in every room I've ever had this shelf in, so I doubt I'll get around to changing it. I found the framed picture on top, which actually began as a Christmas card from a friend in Germany, in a box of stuff from Aelred's office. I liked the strong colors and the way it picked up the red scheme. Gold looks good in a strong-colored room as well, so a number of shiny icons and holy pictures, as well as the olive-wood crucifix, have ended up in here. Bright red seems difficult to work with, because it's so assertive, but on the other hand it provides a clean, dramatic background for things which might look garish someplace else, like a copper dish from Peru which we have hanging on another dining-room wall.

Here's another view of the room, including some very real-life, unretouched desk clutter:



The "desk" is actually an old game table of my grandmother's, and the dark wood -- when you can see it -- is striking against the red wall. My mother found the ladderback chair on the curb, and my brother taught her how to weave the Shaker-style seat. The pastel above it is my father's, a study of Epiphany and Amicus in the meadows between Cambridge and Grantchester, on a walk we took in 2003, our last spring there. The colors in the pastel echo my other favorite colors, which repeat throughout the house: green, blue and yellow. But he gave Epiphany a red hat, which decided the picture's place in this house. Clearly it belonged in the red dining room.

In the end, we didn't repaint the dining room. The things we added over time -- more books, more bookcases, more gold and silver and strong natural woods, a new but very simple ceiling fan -- have made my least-favorite room into my favorite room, with hardly any outlay of money. This is the room people exclaim over, and it's hard to remember that I ever didn't like it.

As I said, our other initial renovation procedure was to tear things out. One of my first moves on taking possession of the house was to remove the doors on all the upper cabinets in the kitchen, which had been updated circa 1983 in that cloying hearts-and-flowers kountry style. Without the cabinet doors, the kitchen still looked dark and heavy, but less closed-in than it had (and now I've painted it and love its new lightness and airiness and openness). Also, about a week after we moved in, the water line to the fridge broke. The fridge backs up to the den, which was carpeted (it's actually in what was once a coat closet opening into the den); the carpet got soaked, and very quickly we realized that there was nothing to do but rip it all out. That was when we first got a good look at our tile floor. Once the carpet was out, we began to speculate: what was under the grungy white linoleum in the kitchen? In the entrance hall? Here's the answer:



Well, drat. I know how to turn pictures, and I did turn this one, but I can't get it to appear on the desktop or in the uploader in its edited form. Oh well. Anyway, we did not find the rug under the linoleum -- but don't it look purty on the tile floor! Taking up linoleum is backbreaking work involving lots of toxic fumes, but this, almost more than anything else we've done, changed the whole face of the house's public areas. Instead of looking like rooms in an apartment complex, cheap and tacky, it suddenly had a strong dose of natural character. The floor looked good with the natural wood tones, cherry and walnut and maple, of our furniture. The furniture began to look as if it wanted to live here.

Another feature I like: paneling. This was probably very pretty, if dark, in its original state, but it had already been painted dark taupe when we bought the house, so when I could finally afford paint, I had no qualms about lightening it up. The v-groove texture adds a lot of natural rustic interest to what could have been a boring off-white room:



The globe dates probably from the 1930s or 40s; the maintenance guys at our old apartments found it beside the dumpster and gave it to Amicus. The bird pastels were done by my dad. The bookshelf, actually a metal utility shelf, we found in the shed of the last rental house we lived in, and as nobody seemed to want it, we hung onto it.

ADDENDUM: I should add that not only were the walls the same taupe that you see on the bottom half of the dining room walls -- that's still the dominant color in the house, once you're out of the kitchen/den area -- but whoever had painted them had left the door frames, baseboards, and molding around the ceiling unpainted, I guess out of guilt for having painted over the wood paneling. Now, in theory this wasn't a bad idea. The thick, heavy millwork in a Craftsman bungalow looks wonderful in its natural state, against whatever color the walls are painted. But this didn't. The wood itself was very pretty, but the frames and moldings were much thinner, less a feature in themselves, than the ones in earlier houses, and in a relatively small, low-ceilinged, darkish room, the effect was to make things seem even smaller and more cluttery. Still, Aelred cringed when I painted the first door frame; he asked if I'd actually thought about what I was going to do before I did it. Actually, I had, quite a lot, and once I'd painted the entrance hall off-white, and one wall of the den the same color, and then turned the corner, and there was the door, and the other side of the frame, the entrance-hall side, was already off-white, it just seemed stupid not to paint the door frame, too. And once I'd done it, I was glad I had. I was so glad that I painted all the baseboards and ceiling trim with impunity and have never regretted it. Maybe it's less "interesting" than before, and maybe it's a crime ever to paint over natural wood, but the ceilings look higher, the whole room looks bigger, with uninterrupted lines of the same neutral shade.

Here is the entrance hall, by the way:



You know how they tell you to try out new and experimental decorating techniques in inconspicuous places; so I chose the entrance hall to try to stucco. It actually turned out okay. This, above, is the worst wall.

Here's another view of the den -- the window corner:



The chest of drawers is my childhood dresser; a graduate-school friend took the black-and-white photograph of cliffs behind another friend's cabin outside Torrey, Utah, in the snow. We were there when he took the picture, and when we lived in England it hung over our mantel, to remind us of the desert. My brother made the box which serves as a little bookshelf, and my dad made and painted the blue box -- it housed a "Snowperson Kit" he made for my kids one Christmas when we lived in Utah. The kit contained a hand-carved red heart, which sits in the other den window, adjacent to the one in the photo, a hand-carved carrot, which had been commandeered for toy-kitchen duty, and a scarf and hat which dollies wear -- snow being in short supply here.

Anyway, I'm starting to feel maybe a little too self-congratulatory here, and also way too self-indulgent, but I am pleased with things so far. It's taken relatively little expense and effort to give at least the public areas of the house a distinctive and cheerful character. I felt so unsure of ever accomplishing this when we bought the house that it still takes me by surprise whenever I come home from someplace. Instead of cringing, as I've sometimes done coming home to some of the places we've lived, I feel warmed and cheered and at home. Which is how your house ought to make you feel.

(still a long way to go. Our bedroom, which is actually the formal living room, really needs to be dynamited. I need to clean, purge, and find ways to make the office space at one end neater and zippier to look at. The hall is narrow and dark, even though the walls are off-white. It's a dingy off-white. The bathroom wallpaper needs stripping, and the vanity needs sanding and repainting -- Helier in a fit of perverseness one day peeled off a good deal of the top dark-green layer of paint. All the bedrooms, still dark taupe, need painting. The boys and Crispina have old and -- in the boys' case -- immensely ugly ceiling fans which need replacing. The carriage-lantern-style lights either side of the front door outside look flimsy and cheap. Surely I can find sharper-looking replacements for not very much. And so on. It needs to be a busy spring. And I suppose I could start by folding the laundry.)