It's a nice little cottage-style home near the University of Houston, in a neighborhood called University Oaks. It's home to many of the school's professors, and I'll actually be living down the street from one of my favorite professors from the Master of Architecture program.
In theory - and according to my November 14, 2016 posting - I have my design ideas all worked out because I've already defined my personal style.
Let me tell you, the crow I'm eating right now tastes horrible.
The problems I'm currently experiencing in figuring out the interior design are many.
The Living Room
So, do I eventually stick with orange, and just buy another orange sofa (while relegating the current one to the study)? Or do I go for a gray or natural linen sofa? Or a caramel leather sofa? There are so many options it makes my head spin. For now, we plan to try to make the orange sofa work, along with the false fireplace. If it just isn't possible, we'll rip out the fireplace, and maybe buy a new sofa.
The Dining Room
The dining room is open to the kitchen, so the two spaces need to work together, but the kitchen is currently SUPER cottage-y, with white Shaker-style cabinets, white tile countertops (so. much. grout. Shudder), and a white bead-board backsplash. Eventually, we'll have the countertops and backsplash replaced - and maybe reconfigure the sink - but I'm at a complete loss as to how to integrate the decor of the dining room and kitchen, since I want the dining room to feel at least a little special and a little more dressy than the average breakfast nook.
At the first house we put an offer on, I'd planned to wallpaper the dining room in blue grasscloth, have a glossy white Strut Table by BluDot beneath a brass chandelier, and throw a sisal rug on the floor. This was also my plan for the second house we put an offer on. This house, though, with its open dining/kitchen doesn't want grasscloth, it seems. Unless we enclose the kitchen when we change the countertops - which I'd hate to do - I'll have to find a happy medium.
Should I paint the cabinets bottle green? Or navy blue? Or do I plan for my dining room to be "Modern Farmhouse Chic" and just run with the all-white business?
I'm not prepared for finding a happy medium.
The Master Bedroom
The Master Bedroom is currently open to the living room beneath it. The stairs that lead up to the attic bedroom end at an open landing, with a very low wall separating the attic space from the open stairwell. Essentially, the master bedroom is a mostly enclosed loft bedroom. Eventually, this - like the kitchen countertops - will change. We'll build a real wall with an actual door to separate the landing from the Master Bedroom, which I'm definitely looking forward to doing.
We'll also eventually annex part of the 18'-0" x 19'-0" Master Bedroom to the existing (unworkable) closets. There are two closets for the Master Bedroom, each tucked under the eaves, with a rod about 6" long for hanging long items, and another 36" rod for hanging short items.
One of the closets also contains a pipe and an electrical box.
Neither of the closets is painted, or useful.
For now, we'll purchase a couple of rolling clothes racks from Target, and use those for clothing storage until we take in the northern 6'-0" of space for a walk-in closet.
The Master Bedroom is also almost entirely beneath the slope of the roof, with vertical walls giving way to sloping ceiling/walls about 34" above the finished floor. Our enormous gilded and linen upholstered Rococo headboard won't even fit upstairs, so it will be sold in one hell of a garage sale once we've moved.
For the first house we tried to buy, I'd developed the design scheme below:
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| © Copyright 2017 by Megan Kidwell for CuratedHouston.com |
My dear husband had even consented to the pink walls, since the rest of the decor would be more masculine. Everything was perfect! And the second house we tried to buy would have worked well with this scheme.
Our "new" home, however, doesn't seem to me to want this scheme. That, and my husband has made it fairly clear in the past few weeks that he dislikes the navy bedspread we bought when we got married, along with the beautiful lavender linen bedsheets we purchased. And pink just doesn't seem right, to me, when it's on attic walls. I might change my mind on this, but this is an entirely different house, so I think my husband will also change his mind.
We've had more arguments over furniture and wall colors and future laundry rooms in the past month than we've had in our whole relationship up to the beginning of this past month. It's insane.
We're holding off on buying anything for the Master Bedroom, for right now. We eventually want a king bed, so there's no use in buying a queen headboard when we don't intend to stay in a queen bed forever.
When we move into the house shortly after March 30, we'll be sleeping on a mattress and box springs sans frame and headboard, with our current bedside tables (which we'll also eventually sell) and current bedding, which is a mishmash of old sheets from the pre-marriage days, and the bedding we bought after our wedding. Until we figure out exactly what we're going to do, upstairs, we'll hold off on painting, too.
[Ed. Note: I also hate the navy blue bedspread, but for different reasons: the batting is coming out through the fabric, so our bedspread constantly appears to be covered in dust and/or dog hair.]
The Study
The house has two bedrooms downstairs, in addition to the Master upstairs. I'd planned to put all three of my custom built bookshelves in the study, along with our white twin desks from IKEA, which we bought because I really loved their design (no joke).
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| Alex Desk by IKEA |
Come to find out, my husband just wants one bookshelf in the study, because the large quantity of books on their shelves makes him feel claustrophobic.
I am learning so much about my husband.
I pointed out to him that the study at the "new" house (12'-0" x 13'-0") will be considerably larger than our current one (9'-0" x 9'-0").
Nope. He still only wants one bookshelf.
We can arrange them so there won't be as many books on them, I explained. We can stage them properly, with only a few books, and a few carefully chosen decorative objects from our collection, like the Oaxacan ceramic pot I bought him for Christmas.
In his words, he "strongly protest[s]".
So one bookshelf will be in the study, and one in the guest room, where it will serve as a nightstand for the two twin beds we'll eventually buy for the room, as well as providing a place to store books, and a few decorative pieces.
The third bookshelf... will probably go in the study for now. Maybe, I can stage them with fewer books and he'll change his mind?
He also dislikes the desks we currently have. He suggested we get one (1) bigger desk to share. The problems with this idea are that 1) he likes to have a neat and orderly desk, and I constantly have a small pile of things to file on the desk (tax stuff), along with pens, random bits of paper or images torn from magazines, legal pads (multiple) with lists (multiple, and sometimes overlapping), along with random tchotchkes, like antique butter-pat dishes and a Beanie Baby polar bear of emotional significance; 2) we sometimes need to use the office at the same time, and the type of desk he's envisioning isn't big enough for that.
So far, he's compromised on this one, saying that we can have separate desks, so long as there's only one bookshelf in the office, whereas I developed a layout incorporating both bookshelves and a single desk, along with a sofa or daybed. I think this furniture situation is going to be an audible, to use a football term. For those who don't follow American football, we'll play it by ear.
Eventually, we intend to finish out part of the remaining upstairs attic (about 10'-0" x 10'-0"), and maybe that can become my own little study with as many bookshelves and books as I want. (It would also make a great retreat for those nights when I'm restless and can't sleep, if we include a daybed.) A little insulation, some wood panelling, a skylight, and I'm all set.
Of course, I'd have to figure out how to decorate that room, too. Honestly, I smell a lot of pink in my imaginary study's future.
The Laundry Room
The laundry room at the "new" house is not, actually, in the house: it's attached to the detached garage, which is, in fact, no longer a garage, but an efficiency apartment. (We plan to renovate the kitchenette in the efficiency and rent it out ASAP, allowing us to pay off the mortgage faster and/or speed up the timeline for repairs and alterations to the house).
When we first saw the house, I told my dear husband that the house was a no-go if we didn't move the laundry room to the house within 18 months of moving in. He agreed, since I originally suggested we build the laundry room in the current unfinished attic space.
I realized, after we'd put in an offer, that it would be impossible to move the laundry room, upstairs, because there was no way to put a door larger than 24" leading into that space, and full-size washers and dryers are wider than 24". I suggested, instead, that we take in about 56 square feet of the MONSTER screened porch to create a Laundry/Mud Room. There's some push-back, but hopefully he'll come around.
