I recently watched a show on Home and Gardens TV where a "genius" interior designer walked into a couple's house for a home makeover. After belittling the homeowners and criticizing everything on their walls, the designer reworked their living room so it looked like Ikea on crack.
I grew up around a lot of farm land, miles and miles from any Ikea store. For housewives married to farmers, a common thread in home decorating involves choosing their favorite farm animal, then plastering their homes with it. Our next-door neighbor had a rooster motif. The house next to their's chose pigs.
I guess the country folk figure that since they make their living from these animals, they might as well have the courtesy to dedicate a wall, or two, or three, to them. Now that I live thick in the suburbs, I've noticed the same courtesy isn't duplicated in the houses around me. Last week I walked into the home of a guy who works as a software engineer. For whatever strange reason, the wife didn't decorate their kitchen with computer-related items. I thought a strip of wallpaper featuring keyboards would have looked good above the cabinets.
One of the latest home-design fads is painting verticle pin-stripes on your walls. Considering myself an able striper, I bought a couple rolls of painter's tape and went to town on the wall in our laundry room. "June Day Yellow" was my background color, and "Deep Sea Blue" was my accent stripe--12 inches on center. I envisioned a morning-breaks type of sensation for all who walked into the room.
After I finished, and after the buzz from the paint fumes faded, I stood back to admire my work. It looked like I was staring at the sun through blue prison bars.
My wife walked in and almost threw up. Out of the goodness of her heart she tried to fabricate some form of a compliment, but I quickly butted in with a promise to erase the prison bars. Luckily it only takes about 13 coats of yellow paint to cover a dark-blue stripe.
Despite my home-improvement failures, I really came through as a hero last weekend. As I was driving along a country road, I noticed a large stash of reeds growing by a farmer's field. Earlier, my wife had expressed interest in a large vase with reeds in it, to put in the living room. Unfortunately, a few decorating reeds in a furniture store cost about as much as their new couches.
We went out and picked the reeds I found. They were transported home, chopped down to size, and stuffed in a big vase we got for only ten bucks. Maybe an HGTV designer would have ripped it to part, but it looked good to me.
And maybe it would have looked even better if I had a job in the reed industry.
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8 comments:
Yeah, my mom's kitchen is decorated with cows. You will see the occasional chicken or pig, but the cow seems to be here farm animal of choice.
Ross I think there is a lot more to you than meets the eye. I like your sense of house painting adventure, maybe you could come over to our house and give us an interior design consultation. What do you say?
Painting. That's when you know you're a homeowner.
That's the thing with you, Ross, you're not afraid to make a house a home. If decorating were up to me, our place would be nothing but a bed, a couch and a TV. And one wall would be devoted to CDs.
I've seen the reeds, and I love the reeds!
Remember they are PIN stripes, that means they should be nice and thin, not like thick prison bars
Where do you find time to tape walls to paint stripes? Did you willingly watch HGTV? There is so much I don't understand about you anymore. Where is the kid who was embarassed by his mother painting the front door blue?
I was always fond of the geese motif. I remember one of my friends' kitchens growing up had geese, and they all had nice little bows around their necks. Maybe Megan could do the kitchen in geese, and you could keep a few goose calls on hand and just honk really loud when you want her to refill your water glass or something!
Another stellar post Ross. We once experimented with the stripes thing.....our walls are now one color. I think it only looks good on HGTV. Speaking of which, did you see Divine Design last week where Candace redid the bedroom for those gay guys? It looked fabulous.
Dude- you really got published in the SLTrib? How?
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