I'd forgotten what it was like. I'd forgotten how dangerous and addicting it all was. I have had the only television in the basement for two years, and I haven't spent much time watching it since we moved here and set the house up. In the last six or eight months, I stopped even trying to watch local news or any kind of network series. But today I made a conscious effort to relive a habit of my past. I turned on shows about cooking and house flipping. The cooking stuff was mildly interesting, watching Alton make ice cream and compare the different shades of chocolate, but it was the home stuff that I should not have sampled. With my budget tapped out (from buying all of these toys I keep talking about, and other projects) I have no remodeling cash on hand. My house is in okay shape for now, as far as decorating goes. Sure, we were discussing the need for a whole house fan five minutes before I picked up the computer to blog just now, but for the most part I can live with my turquoise laminate counters and ugly nude pink kitchen sink for at least another year, while I save money for quartz or soapstone or something.
I watched a string of shows about a guy who renovated old houses in Nashville, and he works in a lane I happily occupy. He likes houses from the same time period that I do, and he tries to make them all stay true to their first-half-of-the-20th-century vintage. I was fine until I watched him dig down several layers to find a wide plank, red pine floor. I very nearly lost my mind. I have some barely tolerable 12 by 12 tiles in my living room, kitchen, and utility room that will be replaced once I have time, money, and energy. (The more money I have, however, the less time and energy I will have to expend on my own.) But there is about to be a new old house in the family (GW&tCDR). It has carpeting on the upstairs and basement, and crappy laminate that pretends it resembles wood on the main. I will have influence over some of the remodeling, but I will not have the power of the purse or veto power on it. I can make suggestions over what sort of floor goes in, but they'll only be suggestions. Watching the Nashville guy match the original 1930 plank floor with 1 by 12s, that they distressed and stained to match made me desperately want to lobby to put a similar floor in this new house. I have no idea what sort of design ethos the home owners are going to follow, nor am I certain that they know yet. I wonder how hard it would be to do a crash course in interior design, to educate all of us, and come up with some clever options.
I'm getting way ahead of myself thinking about all of this stuff. The one house is a month away from closing, and all the things I want to do around my own house are months or even years away from being affordable. Back in the old days, we would have made dream books from photos we cut out of magazines, to plan these kinds of things far into the future. People don't buy so many paper magazines anymore, and the idea of making a physical book from a lot of other books is 20th century thinking. I suppose now that I've remembered what my Pinterest password is so I could log in on the new toy, I could start a whole new board there and share it, once this house closes and things like decorating and floor replacements become a reality. Until then, all of this is just a lovely, expensive-sounding dream.
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