remedecorating part 2

i received some money in bonus and tax refund earlier this year, and decided i would dedicate a good portion of those funds to build a new look for my living room.  and i made a commitment to myself and the Source of my provision that shopping for new living room would not result in the purchase of a new horse.  as it did last time i went shopping for a new kitchen and came home with a Mo.

the new look began with the old look, which was in the neighborhood of shabby chic, next door to delapidated down-on-its-luck rental, and just down the block from partially boarded up but active crack house.

the quilt in the pic below is the only keeper, my first attempt at watercolor quilting — but it will get replaced by the new one in the bottom photo.   which will get started as soon as i finish the archeological dig for the fabric collection, buried somewhere in one of the garage sale staging rooms.   which are all rooms of my home at the moment.  think the reality show Hoarders but with visible navigable floors and working toilets, and without high potential for discovery of multitudes of dead cats (so far).

before ugh 1

before ugh 2

then came the virtual new look.  this is the culmination of months of virtual shopping, fiddle-f-ing with Photoshop, cutting and pasting photos of things I liked, moving the things around on the computer screen, discovering Art.Com (on my planet, oh-my-lord-equivalent in viewing pleasure to what i get from YouTube marathons).

on my computer i painted the room, put new flooring in, put in furniture and decor I liked, without spending a dime.

dream in virtual life

then i commenced to buying the stuff in the picture, until the money ran out.  I actually got a couple more Acts of God in the form of voluntary trips to real stores twice — one to La-Z-Boy.  thank God La-Z-Boy employs an Amy who was so good at her job in picking out furniture for short people.  I eventually did buy furniture that was different than what I had virtually selected.  but the stuff I bought was still within the Genus Furniture, which is just a bit short of an Act of God in itself, inasmuch as I am so ardently attracted to the Genus Equus when shopping for stuff to sit on.

then to Home Depot to look at real floor samples and smugly concluding that the virtual sample i had installed in my computer living room was exactly what i wanted.   when the floor installers came, i was pleased that the three installer dudes were Croatians.  Or maybe two Croatians and one Serbian.   I liked their accents.  Which I heard a lot of because they carried on a non-stop argument of some sort the whole time they were here.

and, with more smug, the virtual paint color i found on Behr.com turned out to be the perfect color when the real-life walls eventually got real-life paint, thanks to Steve the real-life painter dude.  he showed up in immensely comforting all-white clothes spattered with paint.

now I am waiting for more money to finish up with lamps and wall art and what-nots.  hopefully not too much in the Genus What-Not, since the main reason for this whole remedecorating of my living space is to support the decluttering and relaxing and prettifying of the energy of my head space.   so that the real Carol will like it enough to come back and live here.  and then maybe relax enough to do some real writing.

remedecorating part 1

this is sort of like remedial decorating — or me-redecorating — or something.

for the past few months i have been working on my cosmetic fixer of a home.  well, it was advertised as a cosmetic fixer when I bought it 17 years ago.  since then,  in the entire 17 years, i have pretty much done nothing toward any fixing, cosmetic or otherwise, except paint a few walls and replace two rooms-worth of crawly-thing-and-dirt-haven carpet with laminate.

so now, a real estate ad for my home would probably describe it as cosmetic fixer of a house-corpse-in-full-rigor, laid out on the autopsy table badly in need of removal and/or rearrangement of its smelly and crawly insides.

i am determined to keep this house until I myself am beyond life as we know it.   so something must be done before i get so fed up with the beyond-shabby (and sans chic)  ambience that i will skip the house autopsy altogether and go straight to cremation.

part of the reason for not doing much with the house is that i am afraid of tools and hardware.  aka “not mechanically-inclined”.   or, more accurately, mechanically-a-danger-to-myself-and-any-nearby-misfortunates …

… so much so that it takes an Act of God for me to replace a burnt out lightbulb.   it takes a whole separate Act of God for me to buy new lightbulbs to replace the burnt-out ones.   which happens after yet another whole separate A of  G  – cowboying me to the grocery store.

these Acts must be way low on God’s priority list considering the state of my home’s present light bulb operational readiness.  which is Not.  which is OK.  because too much light hurts my eyes. and i have a miner’s headlamp when i need to see something.

i kid you not.  meet my favorite light source.

i console myself for this lack of mechanical/hardware skill by reminding myself of my nice penmanship, which requires knowledge and application of pens and inks.  which are sort of tools, and i am not afraid of them.

and i can use a sewing machine.  i am not afraid of fabric or thread.  as long as I just have to sew straight lines, like for quilts.  Quilts don’t scare me either, unless I am trying to finish one as a gift in a hurry, like two months after its birthday deadline.

Jan’s Waterfall – for my mommy

next up … part 2