Goodbye, wall-to-wall carpets
Hello, three days of chaos! And a new adventure begins in this old house
This week, the wheels came off my life. Chaos took over. I took up my old wall-to-wall carpeting!
The Sturm und Drang defies description. I come from a family that for generations has resisted any kind of home improvements. My Uncle Bob, when you tried to do anything with his house, would yell, “Fuss. Fuss!” He would make you stop. Not a big deal, because I never tried to do much anyway, but still.
My life was upside down for a few days. My friend Cori was over helping me. She is one of the great characters in my life and whenever Cori is around, things move at the speed of light. She is always working. Specifically she is always cleaning. And she makes me clean, too. So all day, for three days as it turned out, we were cleaning and cleaning. I was absolutely dead. I have never done anything like this in my life. The house reeks of cleanser. My other friends would have taken a pause after seven hours or so and said, “Hey, let’s sit down and have a glass of wine.” Not Cori!
No! We just worked and worked. Meanwhile I had that manicure, the second manicure I ever had in my life, remember? I had to put on plastic gloves and hope for the best. What a time to have gotten that manicure. I just did not see all this coming. When I finally left the house after three days to go to choir rehearsal at St. Louis, it was without my music. My music was just gone. I am still in a daze.
However!
The house is clean. The carpets are gone. Unbelievable.
My carpets were, honest, 30 years old. They looked it, too. When the carpet guy came to take measurements, he asked, “Did you just move in here?”
And for a minute I was tempted to fib: “Yes!”
Ha, ha! We laughed about that later. This carpet guy, I call him Carpet Joe, he and I are going to be friends.
I am happy and excited about the living room. Here it is in progress.
The room is bare and full of possibility. I got rid of my old beat-up couch several weeks ago and I do not think I want a new couch. I kind of like the nothingness, after years of clutter. My cat Jeoffry would destroy the new couch anyway, the way he did the old one. So I love the living room. And this is a surprise:
I am even more excited about the dining room!
That is it at the top of this post. There used to be an old china cabinet where the cabinet in the picture now stands. That old china cabinet went to the curb. It has a new life now. Someone picked it up, which makes me happy because I was affectionate toward it. I did not envision how nice the new cabinet would look in its place. The floor is beat-up but that’s OK, I will figure something out. For now I just love standing in the dining room, looking at it, imagining the possibilities, and for now just enjoying it as it is.
It has a Shaker look, something I never foresaw. I can see how with a few cosmetic touches it could have a great Arts and Crafts look, a Craftsman look — some kind of look. Whatever I want. I recently purchased a membership to the Frank Lloyd Wright Darwin Martin House a two-minute walk from my house. Seeing that I now have free passage I am going to go there on a daily basis, as well as to Graycliff, Darwin Martin’s summer estate. I am just going to soak it up and see what happens.
My house has been a dump forever so this is all exciting for me.
Such an adventure!