I've always been struck by that saying, "Start as you mean to go on." I try to be very upfront with people about who I am and what my motivations and personal limits are, so that no one is caught off guard when I suddenly stop and say, "Nope. I'm not doing that. You need to back off." I know how hard it is to live down first impressions as well. I've had people who hated me for years for things I never knew I did on the first meeting. So I try very hard to make the first meetings and new beginnings be as true to life as they can be, and I try to set myself up like I think I want to live. I'm doing that with this house at every opportunity, and so far, it all feels right. Just right.
At the Park, I started out with a guest bedroom and an office, and when I chose them, I chose wrong. I don't remember how we realized that the rooms were backwards, but three or four months in, I decided to move the guest bedroom one door closer to the master, and to decorate it exactly how I had started with the first version. That's how I ended up with two rooms painted sky blue, until the last year I was there, when I turned the office into "the aqua bedroom." When I started redecorating to make the blue bedroom, arranging furniture and putting pictures of my beloved ancestors on the walls, I felt like I was less decorating a new bedroom than uncovering the one that was always supposed to be there. I loved the process of making it, and I loved it when it was done. That room became special to me, as the room of transitions. When new animals came into that house, they stayed there first, and when the few unfortunate ones left me, they died in that room, all except for Torden. I hated taking it apart.
I'm starting to have a few epiphanies about decorating this house, much as I did putting together the transition room. I'm trying to go a new direction here and there, as with the purple paint idea, but I'm listening and taking heed when the house tells me no. I really tried with the purple. I can't do it. It doesn't match anything I own. I remembered halfway through the day today that I planned on decorating the piano bar around a certain abstract painting that my stepfather gave me for my last birthday, called Carillon. I found the box where it was packed, and set it out under the paint samples on the wall. No way, no purple. Then I remembered my friend in Oklahoma had suggested a dark gray door and my BFF-landlady gave me a gallon of mis-tinted pewter colored paint. It's the right color for the door, and when I painted a sample next to the purples, I had an epiphany. I'm going to do the door full strength. Then I'm going to make an accent wall with it slightly diluted with white. Then I'm going to do the rest of the piano bar and dining room with it faded out even further, to pale gray. Problem solved. It's like the house suggested it to me as I sat and waited for the answer to hit me. Just as it should be.
More things are falling into place. We have cleared the last of the debris from the apartment, and scrubbed and mopped it completely. That chapter has ended. We have two of the three doors converted to new handles and locks, all keyed the same, to keys that no one who ever rented this house ever owned. I have unpacked most of the dishes and glassware, and we enjoyed our first bottle of wine here. After a long, tiring day, I cooked my first meal here, the exact one I had planned the first time I realized that big bushy thing in the garden was kale. I made boerenkool stamppot, a sausage, kale, potato, bacon, and cream stew, that as it turns out, goes Very Well with that aforementioned wine, a cabernet sauvignon. And best of all, when I pulled up in the driveway tonight, Mr S-P was chatting with our new neighbor, who seems to be really cool. He bought his house the same week we bought this one. I'm seeing good days ahead.
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