I find I like Alexandra Stoddard’s books best when she’s focusing more on home decorating than on philosophy. Creating a Beautiful Home, while still clearly written by someone in far better financial circumstances than I ever expect to be, is sufficiently general that I can be inspired by it. I don’t find many of the specific tips useful (even if I knew where to buy Fuller O’Brien Paint and was convinced that it was significantly better than Sherwin Williams or Glidden, I am notpainting my bedroom Soft Beauty Pink), but the descriptions of various rooms she’s seen in various houses, and the more general tips, are enjoyable reading.
I’ve always been fascinated-from-a-distance with interior decorating, ever since I read Kahane’s There’s a Decorator in Your Dollhouse when I was eight. I wouldn’t want to do it as a profession (and really, you’d never guess from looking at my house that I was interested in it), but it’s fun to think about what colors would look good in what spaces, play around with fabrics, and noodle over what furniture would function best where. (And then I forget temporarily that I’m not a woodworker and start speculating how I’d build the wooden furniture. It’s great fantasy material. I have this dream of a bookcase/entertainment center unit, with some kind of fancy molding along the top, to replace the rickety board-and-crate shelf in the corner of my living room….)
Reality eventually sets in. I don’t have much spare income, and for the foreseeable it’s slated for plumbing and savings for future reroofing, rather than non-thrift-store couches and decorative accent pieces (as if I need decorative accent pieces — I already have plenty of nifty stuff in boxes because I have no safe place to display them). I have a small child, which puts some restrictions on what I can do with the place (see previous parentheses), and I have to arrange for him to spend a weekend with his father if I want to do any serious painting. (I’ve got the paint for redoing the bathrooms. I need at least 48 consecutive child-free and outside-work-free hours to do anything with it.) I’d love to redo the kitchen (it’s badly laid out, and the tile counter is a pain to maintain), replace the kitchen and dining room linoleum (it’s not hideous, but individual tiles are disintegrating), replace the back door curtains (ugly orange tweed) and for that matter the whole back door (I’d prefer French doors to sliding, or even a regular door and a big window), replace the decrepit front screen door (big holes in the screen, not good when I’ve got the friendly wasp community nearby [I like the wasps. They eat obnoxious bugs, they scare away solicitors, and they leave me alone. But I don't like them enough to invite them inside.]), replace the disgusting brown living room and hall carpet, install some grounded outlets and a phone jack in the living room, replace the awkward sliding doors on the hall closet, put doors on the bedroom closets, close in the carport so I have a garage space that I can actually put the bike and trailer in without unhooking and folding everything, paint all the molding (bright yellow would be nifty, but white might go better, and Sherwin Williams’s Izmir Purple, regrettably, is probably a bad idea)…..
This is what homeownership does to your brain. And I’m not even getting into the really wild ideas, like putting a second story on this place or rebuilding the porch or expanding the utilities room (or the whole back of the house!) about six feet further back. (Now, if I had my dad’s skills, I could do this. Dad built a large addition onto the first house I lived in as a kid, replacing a deck with a downstairs storage room and an upstairs dining room. Alas, I didn’t take advantage of Dad as resource when I was a kid.) There is a reason why so many homeowners talk about how the place eats money.
On the other hand, you live there, and one hopes you spend a lot of time there, so it might as well be as nice a place as possible, right?
