We've only finished the first coat, and the closet doors haven't been painted yet, but it appears Behr Paint's "French Castle" is going to be a tidy neutral background for the fabrics, art, and furniture I plan to add to the sunny room.
Living as I do, with a used furniture and knickknack store in my garage, I won't have to do any shopping to accessorize the Four Poster room, which faces east and gets soft light all day through the pink leaves of the Japanese maple outside its window.
Just using a piece of my favorite raspberry check with the stone-colored background gives you an idea about how reds and pinks and purples work well with this new paint and the freshly rehabilitated red oak floor.
My feeling is that painting and papering in a house, are so disruptive to one's life, one should try to do them as infrequently as possible. You don't have to move out of the room, for example, just to change the drapes or the rugs.
So that's where we are: waiting for the painter to finish up in the next couple of days so we can scrounge around the Echo Drive On Site Antique Mall for the decor necessary to turn the empty room into a cozy nest.
My mother chose to do the opposite of what I'm doing and that is a perfectly good philosophy too: she used a bold, bright paper on the walls, and made everything else in the room quiet and neutral. My niece as a child in the Four Poster room with the old, bold look
I'm going neutral on the walls so that I can bring bright colors into the room through fabric, rugs, and art and textiles. I confess that this is the part I like best and I can't wait to get to it.
Not to mention, the houses's second bath can soon come back out of its temporary isolation.
The living room of Fort Chapman in the morning light.
Long ago I began to buy books about cottages, and often spent quiet hours poring over the pictures of these charming little houses. Most of the cottages were in England or France, but some were in America too. San Francisco. Nantucket. But, I knew, they might have been anywhere.
What I liked best about the houses in the books, was that each one of them was beautiful to live in now, and yet maintained its continuity with the past. Each successive owner may have modernized, but each one did not rip out his kitchen and install marble counter tops and a Sub Zero refrigerator. The cottages had a unique integrity.
Old did not have to mean dilapidated or bad.
When my sister and I inherited the house our parents bought in 1959, I was not sure, at first, that I could stand to live in the place. It had not been filled with happy memories, for one thing. And for another, it was a little down-at-the-heels.
"I'll have to take a baseball bat to the kitchen and the bathrooms, for starters," I said to my sister. She just nodded and said quietly:
"Well, why don't you just think about it?"
Fortunately, I had some months of closet cleaning as her advice rattled around in my head.
For, as I removed the layers of cobwebs and old clutter, I began to recall the pictures of those old places I had seen in my books. In my imagination, I began to see my parents' home in a different light. Why not, I said to myself, apply the same principles to a 1952 ranch style house in California, that I had seen used on an English cottage?
Not only would this idea save money, waste, and disruption, it would also build on the past. Perhaps the results would be unique, I thought. Perhaps I might create a little place that didn't look like everyone else's home.
And so I began.
Hall bathroom during its rehab, as seen through the doorway.
Hall bath with new paper and new accessories. But the hard scape hasn't changed.
You've seen some of the things that I've done here. I didn't gut the bathrooms and kitchen after all. They don't look new. They look like old rooms that have been updated and are prettier than before. At least that is how they look to me. And in each of our homes, I have come to believe, the right way to decorate is to make it the way we like it. Who else lives there? Who else is there to please?
Late in her life my mother said to me several times that a decorator she had consulted told her she should immediately get rid of the copper hood over our living room fireplace. "I suppose she's right," my mother said. "I think I probably should do it."
I didn't say anything to my mother about this, because it wasn't my place to do so. In fact, if you saw the room in isolation, I could see why a decorator might say that about the copper hood.
Living room at Fort Chapman just after the death of my father.
But if you looked at the house as a whole, you might have a different opinion. The handles and drawer pulls in the kitchen are also made of copper. The ceilings are high and beamed. The vision of the architect seemed to be a 1952 ranch house that had been crossed with a Norman farmhouse. So in the end, the copper hood remained right where it had always been. And it looks beautiful to me.
Certainly: no one else on my block has one!
And I finally understood why, after my mother's death, I kept finding ancient copper pots and kettles and watering cans tucked away in boxes, in the garden, and in the backs of cupboards. My mother liked the copper hood too, she just wasn't quite ready to trust her own taste. I shined up all the copper things she collected and put them around the living room. Probably have a few too many of them now. But I'm enjoying their vintage charm.
The last thing I've completed is the restoration of the red Spanish tile in the kitchen. It was a rich, beautiful color; but tile is porous and it had absorbed half a century of dirt and grime--and, probably, some cleaning products, too. I found a young man who knew a lot about tile and he and an assistant spent last Friday cleaning the old tile and repairing the grout.
Jason, cleaning the red Spanish tile.
The kitchen tile, cleaned and restored. On the island, I added a similar tile to complement the original.
I believe there is a metaphor is all of this. I think when we endure profound experiences in our lives--the loss of a spouse, the death of a parent--we often believe we must "start over." And that in "starting over" we must tear down what we've lived so we might build anew.
That certainly is the American way. But I'm not sure it is always the best. What we've lived is what we've lived. As an old home is renewed when it is filled with new love, so it is with our lives. In this old place I am surrounded by the things my mother and father loved and worked for. And now, I've added a layer that is mine.
A house with a good foundation can endure a pretty good shaking. I think most of us can attest to that.
The kitchen after the red tile restoration. My father's old family clock is at right.
Stove Island looked like this for three weeks. The advantage was that you didn't have to open the cupboard doors below to reach the pots and pans--you just put your hand right into the cavity to pick them up. The disadvantage was that there was no cooking surface in the house on which to put a pot.
I was beginning to think my Stove Island was like Pitcairn and would be isolated and uncharted forever. And then Sebastian the Tile Man sailed into port--on a Saturday, no less--and put Stove Island on the map.
He had been at Fort Chapman once before--on April 22 as scheduled--to demo the original tile on Stove Island. We had to do it because the old cook top--a 1952 Thermador--was a 48" monster that had seen better days, and I couldn't find a reasonable replacement to fill its enormous dimensions. Cook tops these days run to about 36" when they are on the large size.
So, I picked out a white GE cook top with grey burners--similar to one I had in my old home in Winter Park, Florida--and arranged with a local company to re-do Stove Island to the new dimensions in a tile that was complementary to the other tile in the kitchen. I was going to have them install a nice piece of granite on the Island, but then they smiled and said I could just pop over to San Leandro to pick it out, and all of a sudden the tile that I saw before me in the shop looked better and better.
After the demo, I had the plumber add a gas line so we would be ready for the re-install date of April 27.
And then, somewhere between Italy where the tiles were made, and Mt. View, California, where they were to be picked up by Sebastian the Tile Man, the "Durango" tiles were mislaid. Honestly, I was beginning to think the tile company was jiving me, and had the great Sebastian far too busy working on other, much more lucrative projects to stop for a day to work on Fort Chapman's tiny Stove Island.
Finally, one day last week, the tiles turned up in Reno (divorcing themselves from Italy, perhaps?) and once they headed down Donner Pass, the tile company called to say Sebastian would be here on Saturday. Ten days late is better than nothing.
On Saturday it wasn't long before I heard the happy sound of Hola Senorita! And oh! What a joy it was to see Sebastian using my pretty front lawn as his workshop! Ordinarily I would have smacked him for strewing wood chips and grout on the green; but, at this point I wasn't about to find his divots anything but delightful.
Sebastian at work using the front lawn as his job site. And oh well for that.
Once he got cooking, which was something I had been unable to do for several weeks, the work proceeded apace.
The Stove Island repaving project begins.
The one thing that worried me the most was that he had to remove the stove from its packing case in the garage--so he could measure it to create the Island template. And I worried, as it sat in the driveway under the spreading arms of the cedrus deodara that it would end up with scratches and nicks and pine sap all over its lovely face. I checked on it regularly. Alone as it was, and vulnerable, sitting on the asphalt.
There lies a thousand dollars of my old Dad's dough, I would say to myself as I checked on the pretty, lonely cook top.
Sebastian had to run an extension cord into the garage to power his tile saw, and in the course of that he noticed--how could he not?--the gargantuan pile of furniture my sister and I had stored in there for our upcoming garage sale. After three or four hours he asked me about a couple of chairs he saw in there, and how much would we be asking for them?
I thought about it and called my sister. I had disliked those faux Victorian chairs for decades. Not comfortable. Not, in my opinion, very pretty. Oh, and my college boyfriend Bill had sat in them one summer evening, waiting for me to appear and accidentally pulled one of the arms off when he rose to greet me. (They needed to be re-glued.) (And he was 6' 4".)
I had this idea. I had nine tiles that needed to be replaced in the grey bathroom shower ... My sister agonized a while then called back and approved the trade. The bathroom shower was repaired while Stove Island was drying before its re-grout. And we traded Sebastian's extra work for the old, red, chairs. Deal! I was happy and so was Sebastian.
My sister always worries that we've missed our big chance on the Antiques Roadshow, and there is something to that. But my feeling is that "things" only have a theoretical value, unless you are willing to make finding their actual value your full-time work. And unused "things" have almost no value at all. Sitting in our garage is not what a chair was made to do. Sebastian had a family who wanted to sit on them--much more sensible. And we got our shower repaired.
So, later Saturday afternoon, we wrapped the day up with a happy ending. The "Durango" tiles (a Colorado name they've adopted in Italy?) looked ab-fab and so did the cook top when it had recovered from its brief stay in the driveway.
Sebastian, in a flurry of sealing the tile.
The darn thing still has to be properly installed and connected to the gas line by the plumber. And it needs a little piece of moulding around the bottom of the tiles. (Why not? Every project so far has been missing that one final thing.) So, I still can't boil water anywhere in the house, except in the microwave.
But we moved several steps forward. Got Stove Island well on its way to joining the League of Nations. Got the shower-that-has-been-bugging-my-sister-for-three-decades on its way to having a new mixer and faucet.
And I got to say Adios! to a couple of things that were taking up space in the garage. And a very nice young man took Mom's old red chairs home to his family.
The Adventure of Stove Island turned out to be an excellent adventure indeed.
I warned Sebastian, as he drove away, not to let his daughter's boyfriend sit in the chairs, until he gets them properly re-glued.
When I bought this Hunt Board, did I remember my mother's table with the Moustache Man on it?
I've finally had a few days off from the workmen, who seemed to move into my house with me, the way Eldon the Painter did at Candice Bergen's house on the old TV show Murphy Brown. My workmen were here with such regularity, I was beginning to think I should start grocery shopping for them and doing their laundry (if they could ever get my washing machine connected.)
In wandering around the house free of plumbers, electricians, and cable technicians, I noticed my office. What a dump.
I started to tackle it and bring it into some semblance of order. These days I don't just have my own work to organize, my own writing projects to sort and my own decorating ideas to execute, I also have my parents' estate and the Family Trust to sort through. We have a secretary who comes in twice a month to help with the family stuff, so I decided I should at least clear a path for her to the files.
I confess I would much rather be doing the decorating part in what you might call the public rooms of the house. That's much more fun than figuring out where my computer table will fit between the guest beds, my memorabilia trunk, and my Dad's old boxes of documents on his war time experiences on Ascension Island.
So, from time to time on that beautiful California day, I would wander into the sunny living room and walk around. That room is coming together nicely--though I know there is too much furniture in it right now.
The living room on moving day plus eleven.
I follow Coco Chanel's advice on style, translated into my own decorating dictum: she told women that they should put on everything they wanted to wear that day with all the accessories, and then, just before they walked out the door, remove one thing.
That's a bit like the way I do a room: macro before micro. I put everything in there I like, and then I take things out until it looks the way it should. So I have several more steps to go in the living room. But as I was standing around looking at things, I zeroed in on the big hunt board I bought on the East Coast. How could you miss it? It is eight feet tall and intricately carved. I didn't need such a huge piece, but I loved the carving and my excuse for buying it was that I could hide my television and its various accessories inside the hunt board's upper cabinet.
The hunt board: there are tropical birds carved into the two lower panels. One is fishing and one has a snake in his mouth.
As you can see it has two center drawers with carved drawer pulls in the shape of a lion-faced-man with bushy eyebrows and a big moustache. I've always thought he looked a little like a fantastical drawing of the West Wind, blowing a storm into the sky.
Here's the curious part: last week I moved a small, elaborately carved table of my mother's next to the hunt board, mostly because I decided to take her table out of the entry, and this spot in the living room was the easiest place to push it for the time being. I thought it might be a little too much carving, tête-à -tête, but I figured it was temporary. My mother's carved table.
You'll think I'm a dunce, I guess, but it wasn't until yesterday that I noticed why I had really put the two pieces together. By now I'm sure you, at least, have noticed the center drawer pull on my mother's carved table.
Was I copying my mother when I bought the hunt board? Since I didn't remember her table, I can't honestly say that I was. I've never actually liked that table. But the subconscious sometimes just pushes us along, like the West Wind blowing the clouds across the sky.
It is clear for now that the two Moustache Men will have to remain together. They are made of different wood and stained with different stains but they are too similar to separate. The alliance may be an uneasy one. But my mother and I knew a lot about that. And those West Wind Moustache Men must have had a powerful need to be together. One Mom's. One my own. Who am to part them now?
The 1952 Thermador oven. Can you believe how contemporary it looks? That's my pal Fred the Electrician, measuring the Thermador for her replacement.
Just a quick note as I have to schlep over to a large Hardware Diaspora to switch the electrical cord for my dryer (three prong) for the correct cord (four prong): another in a series of errors perpetrated by the folks at HD, who have only one solution for everything: "Just come on back to the store and we will exchange that for you." (Fortunately, I have nothing else to do.)
Anyway, the oven that has served my family's home since before it was my family's home, has finally gone the way of all things made by man: it has done gone and been replaced.
The Thermador fit into this cabinet that was slightly under 24" wide, which left us few options on the replacement side. BTW, look at how she was connected: no plug, just a pigtail of wires. That must have been code in 1952, when the house was built. Good thing we didn't set the house on fire, lo these fifty years of dinners.
But it still worked well enough for us to cook a turkey in it for my mother's funeral reception in December. And in March, for my father's funeral reception, my sister stayed at the house and used the old Thermador to cook the food that fed her family. The temperature gauge wasn't correct and the clock had stopped working about twenty years hence, but we did get good service from her since my mother and father bought the home that contained her in 1959.
In her place: the expensive German secret weapon. The Vengeance Oven. We fought them to make the world free for democracy and now we pay them to build our ... ovens, of all things.
It took two men to install it. Fred the Electrician and Raul his helper. Raul seems to have used some form of magic spell on the thing when he took it out of the box, which I managed to catch with my camera.
Actually, I think Raul was just removing the wrapping from the oven's handle, but at this point in my life, an oven with a magic spell has a definite appeal.
All these appliances are going to be far more energy efficient than the old ones, at least that is what the paperwork says. And we are supposed to get a tax rebate on most of them, so that should at least pay for, say, the handle on the der Ofen.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to admit that this fancy appliance is a Miele. I chose GE for the rest, because I've always thought GE appliances were so gemütliche. And they cost so many less marks than the Broiler from Berlin.
The fix is in. Now I'll have to learn do something with my oven, other than use it to store my shoes.
The Thermador looking forlorn in Fort Chapman's driveway. What a hip-looking appliance she was. And you could fit a lot of shoeboxes in her interior.
My niece as a child in the Four Poster room with the old, bold look
