When a home gives you lemons...

Our home has a lemon stained glass window in our downstairs bathroom. It's time to decide what to do with it. And when life gives you lemons, make a lemon-infused space. 

Time and again in my interiors reading, I hear that designers often face a design element that cannot be changed, and thus, the homeowner decides to avoid overlooking the element and instead lean into it. 

This, I think, is that moment for our house. The lemon stained glass is still pretty and fits the window that I really don't want to remove right now (it's almost WINTER!). If you've done renovation, you'll learn costs can quickly mount if you go willy nilly into removing everything without care. 

This is the paper I decided on. Lemons it is.

Friends on Facebook have weighed in on the design. Some agree that my idea of adding wainscoting and trim will help the space that, until now, has been a broad brush effort in this renovation effort. Previously, I painted it Del Mar Blue (a beautiful color in our upstairs) and then the deep and lovely Newburg Green of the upstairs bath. The colors just aren't sitting right in there, and, despite my promises to avoid wallpaper of any stripe after removing at least nine different kinds in that space, I'm going to wallpaper it. (However, I'm planning to REMOVE the wallpaper going forward instead of just tacking on another layer if I happen to change my mind down the line and redecorate. Future Me will thank Me.)

The next part is waiting for the wallpaper to arrive. I have the other wallpaper that I plan to use to mimic wainscoting. Starting out, though, I plan to un-color drench the bathroom with a primer to the ceiling and baseboards. Then, I plan to see how far up the wall the wainscoting will go -- if at all. The wallpaper might just be so beautiful that I'll do all the walls with it. My fear with that, though, is that the walls will look too busy with too many lemons. Have you ever gone into someone's bathroom and been overwhelmed by a pattern? I don't want visitors losing their way to the toilet or the sink in a lemony haze.

We'll see. And I hope to keep progress reports up on this project. So far, I've been doing a lot of things by charging forward and ahead to keep momentum going. This one, though, could benefit from some input. I like getting input on a smaller space that could be easily changed. I also am enjoying the fact that many of our main rooms are pretty much complete and I can focus on writing and photographing things a bit more without complete overwhelm. Remodeling a six-bedroom house is not for the faint of heart. Just to recap, here are some of the COMPLETED PROJECTS in this nine-month renovation: 

1. Plaster ceilings

2. Refinished floors

3. Paint interiors - six bedrooms, hallway, kitchen, parlor, living room and dining room. Only our movie room remains for painting.

4. Renovated bathrooms (2) - adding a third in good and due time.

5. Carpet in upstairs bedrooms and offices

6. Kitchen and laundry refinishing - reclaiming spaces for a breakfast nook and laundry room and eventually a remodeled kitchen

7. Remove an above-ground pool, hot tub, deck and decrepit grape arbor. Reclaim a vegetable gardening space.

8. Paint exterior historical windows and weatherized wooden detailing and porch

9. Remove and replace homemade stained glass craft project with professional stained glass front door window.

10. So much wallpaper removal. Three floors of hallways and the downstairs bath had, in total, 12 layers of wallpaper. The kitchen had so many roosters.

Looking back now, I think the most rewarding part of this is a realization that so many renovators/rehabbers/refinishers/preservationists have made: Doing this requires being decisive. And, in being decisive, you face your fears and live with the actual consequences of your actions. That's hard. 

When I became a semi-minimalist, I had to face that then, too. You live with the fact that you may have to re-buy something you decided to declutter, but the benefits of living with LESS far outweigh the cost of having so much inventory in your home.

Those decisions weigh now a little differently. I'm often sifting through thoughts about the next project, and, in the moment, I find myself pausing about this or that. Nine times out of 10 that pause or hesitation is about facing some kind of fear about my skill set or what the decision will do. I learned how to remove and reconnect lighting this year. I was so afraid of shocking myself. It was a rational fear, but with some learning -- and turning off electrical breakers(!) -- I faced the fear and saved a ton. Now I'm pausing about this project because I'm afraid it will look odd and I'll have to face that in front of friends and family who are watching. (I suppose this is how it is when home renovation shows do their thing too. We just don't have a television-sized budget.) But we'll just keep going. 

If the lemons turn out to be a lemon, I'll paint the bathroom all white and move on until the mood strikes to try again. I really hope my first foray into wallpaper isn't a dud.

(Just a little amazing find while researching for this post -- Home Depot has a pretty amazing selection of Anaglypta paintable wallpaper! Will definitely be digging into that soon!)

 

Mount Pleasant's Trump-Harris Halloween Parade debacle: A parent's reflections

Search "Mount Pleasant Halloween" and you'll find national articles pointing to my hometown. My current town. The town that my husband and I moved our family to this year -- for a break from the fast-paced crazy we once found in our former lives in Texas.

Are you laughing yet? I am -- in a sad, exhausted way.

We moved to a swing state during one of the most vitriolic election years in American history.

My younger son learned the word "rape" from a political advertisement that played during his kid-topic YouTube videos. My older son asked on the way to his gym class whether, indeed, as the advertisement said: "Did Bob Casey FAIL us?"

Then, in the middle of the Mount Pleasant Halloween Parade last Wednesday, my two little kids saw a woman depicting Kamala Harris chained/tethered/handcuffed/leashed to the back of a golf cart with two men (one dressed as Donald Trump) wielding a sniper rifle on a tripod from the top of the vehicle. The vehicle was "protected" by several others flanking the vehicle and dressed as federal agents.

I saw the gun first. 

My initial thought was for the safety of my kids, in front of me, gathering candy off the street. My little boys wear Asics. The little one sometimes wears Velcro sandals when he can't find his Asics. I didn't remember just then what they were wearing, but my mind instantly went to identifying them if needed. In a real-life morgue. 

I was at a Halloween parade. This suddenly got really sad, really fast. But isn't that how this all happens -- over and over in American public spaces? Fun at concerts. Fun at the mall. Being together. Little kids learning their ABCs. My mom and sister and cousins were just down the street. 

I turned to my husband and said, "Breathe. Just breathe."

It's a refrain I immediately turned inward, as I always did as a journalist when reality hit too hard in the moment:

"Just breathe": The Capitol is locking down. January 6.

"Just breathe." A shooting in Uvalde. Several fatalities. Likely juveniles.

"Just breathe." Matthew McConaughey tearfully holding up a pair of sneakers necessary to ID a little girl gunned down in her classroom.

"Just breathe." Police called to an active shooter situation at Sandy Hook Elementary.

As this editorial notes, parade watchers were pulled from the fun of the Halloween festivities into election politics. For a few minutes, all I saw was the gun. Was it loaded? (Open Carry is lawful in Pennsylvania, but it doesn't make it any less jarring to see.)

I eventually saw the Donald Trump mask. It was a political statement. I shook it off -- as most people can do. As we've had to do to keep on going. To be normal when all is definitely not.

A political tableau. OK. That really didn't make any of it better -- especially as I saw what was bringing up the rear: a woman dressed as Harris who agreed to be shackled to a golf cart and paraded through town. What was her involvement? What was her damage to be agreeing to such a thing? How long had this whole thing been planned? Did anyone think -- and even scarier -- what had they thought? Did anyone have misgivings and then say, "whatever," and continue down that road (Death Bed the Bed that Eats People-style)? Who let them onto the parade route?

The mayor and others have issued statements. I've read them. I've processed them. However, the only thing that is staying with me is that visual and my reaction: "Just breathe." Have I -- have we -- been reduced to just surviving through all of this crazy? It seems so. Upon reflection, I've found I helped normalize a scene that could have been pulled directly from "The Handmaid's Tale." This is NOT OK.

And that's just one aspect of this. I'm a white woman. What did Black and brown people think who saw this? It's just cruel and terrible and so embarrassing. My town. 

In a statement, Daylon A. Davis, president of Pittsburgh’s NAACP branch, called the act “harmful” and racist. 

“This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and brown communities have long endured here in America.”

This kind of representation does real harm. And the target audience of a Halloween parade is children. This is how you chose to represent a Black person in a Mount Pleasant parade? Seriously? 

What will be the benchmarks for inclusion in the parade going forward?

I was happy to see people's outrage in the videos circulated and in news reports in the days after. That's the Mount Pleasant I know and am proud to be living in.

We'll likely see changes to next year's parade: Some process. Applications. Vetted parade entries. Maybe. We'll see who wins the election. 

As for me, I'm standing with Mount Pleasant's mayor, as she noted in this NBC report: "This needs to stop. In this country, this needs to stop."