What Have We Done!?! (What we have done)

We spent our New Year's Eve day painting my room. It's physically located between Brie's room/guest room (sage brown walls with earth tone red/browns/greens) and the our bedroom (warm, saturated blue/black). There was desire to balance the colors, without creating two similar rooms. We played around with lighter blues and yellows, but with the cork flooring the blues made the room look like a nursery and yellows were all too close in tone to the cork so it made the room look like a 1 color cube. We also know that this room is going to see a lot of art/canvases/framed items hung up and that took most higher note or saturated greens off the table as they would make a terrible backdrop for most of these pieces. We ended up spinning the wheel on a more saturated purple that was warm, but not too heavy. I also wanted to bring in another grounding color b/c unlike Brie's room where her closet doesn't go to the ceiling, I have this giant wall above the closets and wanted t...

We spent Friday breaking down my office and moving it into the bonus room. This led to the discovery of an outlet that didn't have power that previous did have, yadda yadda things snowball. So here's a belated post and then another to come. While I share some space with the dogs, we're going to paint and floor my office. But I really want to highlight someone else's writing today. *** McMansion Hell is a top notch architecture and style criticism blog run by the furiously talented Kate Wagner and they alternately feature discussions on trends in bad house décor and design and lessons in proper and logical architectural applications.  Since Blogmas is focusing on a lot of the color and design choices we're considering, I thought their most recent post, on the whiting/greying of the American home and how these decisions are often made based on exterior assumptions over interior demands, fit perfectly. Please enjoy. this house may or may not be real -S.  

Today I present a brief photo essay on the taxonomy of piles titled: "Stuff, Junk, or Trash"  ***  We're nearing the end of year 1 in the house and many of our belongings are still A) in boxes or B) piled up somewhere on shelves or in closets. Duck Brand funded a study about moving and according to that limited source, Americans take about 6 months to fully unpack after major moves. And there are some major outliers like boxes in storage for 6 years or books in the basement for 3 years. A lot of it points to people owning and shlepping things around the world that they don't actually have need or place for.  This morning I threw out a box of items I had been holding on to for nearly a decade. I perceived it to have some emotional value and some practical value, but the start-up energy to in any way make use of the items in the box was enormous for an, at best, intangible pay off. That box traveled from the Knoxville house to storage, from storage to our Virginia apart...

  Yesterday's talk about breezeblocks ended up invoking The Room quite a bit so I figured it was time for an update on that arena. Reminder: this is the converted carport space that brie and I ended up demo-ing thanks to mold and other reasons. That was back in October and we left some layer of dust and light debris on the floor b/c a project has to end at some point. Here is its current form. Brie went back in as part of another project we have in the works and did a proper clean up.  The space looks great and through 3 months of very wet weather it's been dry as a bone. No leaks, no nothin'. All of this is incredibly positive and keeps us on pace to finish The Room some time in the late Spring/early Summer.  The main space is 16' x 21.5' (344ft²). The back space is set on a higher concrete slab (we believe these storage areas to be original to the carport) so wouldn't be ideal for inclusion in the main space. Current plans are to remove the cross-T wooden fram...

We get an embarrassing amount of packages delivered to the house. Partially a byproduct of COVID safety habits and partially the nature of ramping up a home reno project, there's rarely a week that goes by that we don't see multiple deliveries. The same goes for food delivery, especially when long hours or messy interior projects leave us unable to cook. Unfortunately for us, our house numbering is a bit wonky.  The mailboxes for our part of the street are the type one sees on rural backroads where placing all boxes on one side of the street makes it easier for a postal worker who has to travel 200 miles a day. This double box is set up on the property line b/t us and the neighbor on our right rather than anywhere near our driveway. And the only numbers on the house are placed on the main mass of the house which is set back a bit. They are of course light reflective numbers to make them as unattractive as possible though! We're looking into whether there's some code rea...

  Welcome to first of 12 (ish?) micro blogs to carry us into the new year. Bite sized portions of what this year has been like and where the next year will take us. *** Laying out major life changes in a semi-public forum can be daunting at times. I try to write honestly about the troubles we face or the choices we're making and that's done with the knowledge that I will rarely be able to have a back and forth discussion with the reader and whatever impression is made will inevitably be out of my hands. Given this, the pull to be defensive of one's choices or over explain the rationale can be overwhelming. The tone of the blog (a bit bombastic, at times hyperbolic, and maybe even confrontational towards a would-be strawman reader) is often my way of powering through these concerns and achieving enough escape velocity to hit publish.   That's on my mind right now as I prepare this week to discuss some of the design and color choices we're envisioning rather than just...