Ya'll didn't know we lived in the tropics, did you? We don't, but somehow we're managing to grow (and go!) bananas! Neel and neighbor-Tyler planted several banana trees around each of our yards this spring, and a few weeks ago Tyler noticed that one of ours was flowering! To say we were stunned was an understatement. I mean, we're hot and muggy here, but not nearly tropical. Remember all that snow we got last winter?

But if you look closely, behind that gorgeous flower, there they are. Little tiny bananas!

None of Tyler's trees are bearing fruit and our feeling about this is that our own tree has been blasted by the compressor from the air conditioner all summer. Kinda like it's own little micro-climate. I have high hopes for these little guys, but even if they don't get any bigger or yellow enough to cut up into our cereal, I'm calling it. We grew bananas.

This was my great-grandmother's chair. We call it the "Tart's Boudoir." I think I told you that we tend to nickname things around here. Everything except me. Anyhoo. Doesn't that look like where this chair belongs? All carved wood and deep red velvet. Perfect for a tart's boudoir.

I don't actually have a lot of good to say about my great-grandmother. I don't think I ever met her, but the stories my dad could tell! Boy-Howdy.

What I do remember of this chair is of it in my grandparent's house. Not a tart's boudoir. Past the days of parlors (and whorehouses, I suspect), this chair never looked like it belonged. It just didn't look quite right with their green shag carpet, ya know?

 
Still, this chair appealed to me, and when my grandparents died, I knew I wanted it. We tried it in the living room, but it just wasn't a look I was going for. Still formulating that look apparently. It landed in the dining room for awhile, but it was damned uncomfortable at the table (too low), even though the red looked really lovely against the turquoise walls.

We have a bare corner in our bedroom where once sat a leather club chair that Neel took into his office, and suddenly this weekend it struck me that Tart's Boudoir would look really nice against the dark blue walls. I had but to suggest it to my husband, and he snuck it up when I wasn't looking. It works, it really works. There's a window on this side of the room, and even curtained it lets in the most delicious shaft of subtle light.

The Tart's Boudoir belongs. In my bedroom no less.

It's been a whirl of gaiety around these parts lately. My mom was here for nearly a week, and just as she left we geared up for some dinners out and dinners in. The dog hair is driving me crazy. Just as I thought we were on a downswing, it's as if the girls have started shedding again. There's no keeping up with it. We had some new-ish friends for dinner on Saturday, and when we have company the girls go into their crates on the sunporch. I mentioned the dogs to Beth, the wife of the couple who came to dinner, and she was stunned to hear we even had dogs. In my head I did a HUGE fist pump in victory over the dog hair. By Sunday we needed to vacuum again. But on Saturday night things looked good.

I am in full-on house love right now. Sort of. There's so much I want to do here in the little gray house. Indoors and out. But this space feels good. Summer vacation is so good for helping me feel on top of things (like the dog hair, and the dusting...). The living room still eludes me. Upholstering may be more trouble than it's worth, but I'm not sure how much longer I can stand to look at our not chic-ly shabby furniture. And remember that long list of things that I mentioned wanting? It includes new dining room chairs too. Still, it feels good in here.

Neel's working on the back patio. I'll post some pictures of his progress here really soon. He has a rhythm where every Saturday morning, first thing, he heads to Lowe's to buy concrete. He pours four pads each weekend, and lets them sit through the week. The following weekend he pops the pads out of their molds (using the broken ones to line a path) and starts all over again. Slowly, slowly a patio is growing.

Since I'm on a France Mayes kick these days (I re-read her books every few years, and summer more than any other time seems to be the time I dive in to ex-pat/house love/culture shock memoir.), I've decided that I want a long, rustic table for the patio. A table for parties (we want to have more parties) and dinners and lingering in the summer evening light. Neel thinks he can make that too. And Callum, bless his heart, has decided that rather than a party at Go-Kart world, or even Great Wolf Lodge, all he wants for his 12th birthday is a neighborhood cookout. I love that about him. He's happiest here, surrounded by his neighborhood family, grown-ups and kids alike. We have a little time to prepare, but the patio (and table?) will need to be ready for that.

So it feels good in here, and the order is part of that. When I was 14, my family traveled to London for our summer vacation. After we came back, I had a cigar-type box in which I kept a few souvenirs. Some British pounds, subway tokens, museum ticket stubs, playbills...that kind of thing. As appealing to me as looking at each individual thing I kept in that box was the satisfying order of the items in the box itself. I like order. I'm just not so good at it.

I've made a commitment to myself to just knuckle down and make the bed every single day. It's not at all hard...just sometimes hard to get around to. It's made such a difference. Like the order of that made bed filters down to the whole house. Neel and I were sitting in the front yard having a chat yesterday afternoon and some friends-of-friends walked by with their daughter. Our house is pretty fetching from the outside (I can say that because I just bought the place, I didn't build it!), and the wife of this couple was so sweet and admiring about it. I suggested that she come in and take a look around (knowing that I'd fought the dog hair and won, just the day before), and it felt really nice just to offer my sweet home up and show it off to this near stranger. I think it was the made bed that made me unafraid to do that. We even went upstairs!

I'm not going say there isn't clutter around. There's a pile of junk by the phone that never goes away. Right now there are placemats drying on the counter in the kitchen hallway. Once when being invited for the first time into the house of a woman I much love and admire, she explained the folded laundry on the dining room table by saying, "We live in our house." I quite like that. It's not a show place here. We live in our house. But I'm gaining order. I'm finding balance. It feels good in here.

There were three things about this kitchen remodel that were really important to me. Open shelving, concrete counters, and a gas range. I stuck to my guns on all three, and I'm so glad I did. The open shelving took convincing the contractors. I know, you shouldn't have to convince your contractor, but they did try to talk us out of them. Someone pointed out that you'll see the clutter. Well, we have plenty of cabinets to hide the cluttery stuff. Someone else pointed out that the stuff on the shelves will get dusty. Well, I have an answer for that too. The things on the bottom shelf, and most of the middle shelf really, we use almost every day. The things on the top shelf, my pretty platters, well we always wash them before we use them anyway. Dust-schmust.

The gas range was important to me too. I would not say that it took convincing necessarily, but Neel might have needed time to understand how important cooking with gas was to me. Given that getting gas to the kitchen was a tricky task, I had a bit of a stand to take, but he gets it. Cooking is a big part of sustaining our family, not only physically but emotionally. We had a gas stove in California, I dearly missed it when we moved here to Virginia. This stove has an electric oven (bonus) and a griddle that we use all the time. It's good. Good to me and good to our family.

I felt pretty strongly about concrete counters too. Partly for the look, partly to not take something else away from the earth, and partly just to be different! Neel took some convincing here too. After he let me do some research and looked into it with me, he was on board. Our contractor didn't have any experience with concrete, so I can't blame him for suggesting granite. We didn't want granite.

Here's the sink. You can't see it in this picture, but under the dish rack the counter is sloped to help the water drain into the sink. Neel loves that part.

It was our concrete guy who recommended that we place tiles from the backsplash in the counter in the hallway. Good call! The thing that's tricky with concrete is that you can do anything you want with it. Any color, most any shape. If you want to add your wine-bottle collection, well, do that too. It was hard to decide. Ultimately (obviously) we thought that the dark charcoal would provide a nice contrast to the light cabinets.

Now the hallway and kitchen go together.

The backsplash ties into the counter in the hall...cohesive. My mom got me that gorgeous stockpot for Mother's Day. I love the way it looks in here.

We put in new floors too. The old floors were pretty beat up, and knowing that we couldn't match the orignal floors in the house we went with full-on contrast. The floors tie the hall, kitchen and family room all together.

Here's the family room from the dining room doorway.

Violet loves it there.

 Are there things we don't like or things we wish we'd done differently? Oh, sure. The sink is a bit low to be as deep as it is. Especially for taller folk. I wish we had a better placement for the microwave too. Right now it's on the counter in the hallway (see above), and I really, really don't like it there. I'm working on it though. Much as I'd love to tuck it away somewhere, I'm not sure it's possible. At this point I'd settle for getting it up off the counter. Maybe a shelf above the counter in the hall, but I might be getting carried away with shelves! We need some doors in the hallway, one in particular to hide a storage area (I'm leaning frosted.), and I'd like a better bar/wine cabinet. In the family room, the coffee table is too small, but it works for now. We probably could use a better tv table too...more to scale. But seriously? That's it. Not too bad.

This might be my favorite part of the house, but...

I'm not sure the dogs agree.

Our neighbors Rebecca and Evans are remodeling their kitchen, and watching their process really takes me back to our whole major kitchen re-do. I'm happy in this space every day, and believe me, we spend a lot of time in this space every day. I'm not sure I ever gave a tour of the finished project (There are still bits and pieces of quarter round to go up, but what project is ever really finished, ya know?), so I thought I'd do that. But first, let's look back, shall we, to what once was...

It started like this. When I had the flu and was home sick for a week, I watched a lot of HGTV. HGTV is perfect when you have the flu (or any other illness, I imagine) because you can be awake for the first part, doze off for the middle, and stir yourself just at the end to see the final product. All I wanted to do was paint the walls (they were, at the time, a rich mustardy yellow) and get a new backsplash. We ended up with new paint and a new backsplash, yes, but also counters, floors, a new range and hood, sink, dishwasher, and a whole new hallway/room. Not too shabby. However, because I often think that Neel thinks I'm the excessive one in our marriage, I feel it's necessary to remind him that all I wanted was to paint and maybe put in a new backsplash.

  Here's a really messy in-progress "before" shot. Note the detrius on the counter. Note also the mustard walls, going gray and the hated backsplash above the stove. Fortunately, getting rid of the backsplash meant getting rid of the counter, which I also hated. Let me see if I have a picture of that....

Lordy, I hated that counter. U G L Y. Buh-bye.

For a long time we lived with the pantry in the family room and dining room. Neel attached a faucet to a piece of plywood so we'd have a sink, but still...it was rough. And dusty. More on the dust in a bit.

The kitchen gets demolished and cabinets get delivered.

  Cabinets get installed.

Counters get built and installed.

Through it all (and the installation of the concrete farmhouse sink was especially tricky), Neel kept laughing. That's why I married him, people.

After we started on the kitchen, Neel couldn't help but take a look at the useless little hallway we had off the kitchen. This hall ended with the living room on the other side of the back wall. It was narrow and dark, housed a pantry of sorts and a big water heater. It was my friend Mark who first suggestedt that we look into blowing a hole into that wall, making a straight path from the front door through the kitchen.

Neel's tricky. He lulls you into thinking he's cautious, but as soon as he decided on something, he pulls the trigger. He surprised me with that little hole - that's the wall on the living room side.

It quickly became this.

Then this.

And this.

Cue the electrician. (only the best electrician ever, by the way)

Add some gorgeous plaster work...

And in addition to a new kitchen, we have a hallway/butler's pantry...with a door at either end. When Neel and I first started talking about re-doing the kitchen, I pointed out that we spend 90% of our waking time in the kitchen and family room. Why not make it something we really, really loved? And now we do. While I feel like there are maybe one or two things I'd do differently, and a couple things I'd still like to figure out, for the most part, we didn't compromise at all. Check back tomorrow to see how it all turned out.

So the great living room redo continues apace. Slowly, but still. It continues. I painted the fireplace wall, which had been a color called "tamarind" (It can be seen here.), and now it's PINK. I know, PINK! It's almost barely pink, and I love it. Actually everyone does. I'm so glad I went with my instincts and just did it. The room already feels lighter and brighter.

Finally, finally, we're I'm starting to tackle painting the trim. Of course the dentil moulding is taking three coats. Of course it is. But, oh good grief, it looks so much better. I can't believe we waited so long. So the windows are done, the baseboards almost, and the dentil...Well, we're working on it.

Next up, furniture. I'm not sure I'm going to manage Mark's $500 limit (we have to reupholster a sofa and need at least one new chair), but I'll try.

And since we were talking about food, I wanted to take a quick second to show you guys a piece I just got for our dining room. It came from Selma's, which I mentioned last week. (There's a whole post about that place coming soon, I promise...) I'd been in the store taking photos for a few hours, and my eye kept landing on this Box Sign. I'd been looking and looking for something for one spot in our dining room, and I couldn't resist. The woman who makes these (Primitives by Kathy) has many versions that are less, ahem, pointed. This seemed to suit our needs the best, however.

After years of near-riotious explosions of color, we're finally calming things down a bit around here. When we first moved from California I worried a lot about leaving light behind. We'd grown quite used to endless days of sunny skies, and facing winter again was a daunting task. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I went a little crazy with the pastels for awhile there in an effort to counterbalance what I feared would be months on end of leaden gray, early dark afternoons. Our hall and entry was a sunny yellow, and for a (brief) while the living room was an almost sky blue. It was cheery all right.

In the seven years since we've been here, the dining room, living room and family room/kitchen have all changed color several times (the dining room and living room both a grand total of three each -yikes!), and we've gradually moved to a more muted color palette. Our family room is a sea gray (color: zircon from Sherwin Williams), the dining room is Valspar Brilliant Metals from Lowes, sort of a Tiffany box blue color, and the living room, also from Valspar is a creamy pearl. (I did a quick internet search for the actual names of the colors and didn't have much luck. Besides, I seriously doubt you're going to run out and paint your house just! like! mine! anyway.)

These three colors feel good together. They feel subtle and minimal, which was the sense I wanted in this wandery downstairs of a house, but that left large parts of the place with those (admittedly cheery) pastels that just didn't feel right anymore.

Say goodbye to The Lavender Room. Remember our guest room with all of my grandmother's lovely things? What I decided I wanted was a unified color in the downstairs entryway, the stairwell (pictured at the start of this post), the upstairs hall and the guest room. One seamless flow of creamy white.

So we started with the guest room. The alcove in that room is such a sweet spot that we kept it purple, but I wasn't even very sad to paint over the rest of it with that bright, warm white (Fresh Cotton, also Valspar, also Lowes).

I'm glad we kept that little nod to the way it used to be. Although my dad was the first to stay in the rehabed room, I thought about my mom a lot as we I painted. It was her mom who loved purple so much. Her mom's painting hangs on the wall. Her mom's bed sits cozily piled with comfy blankets and pillows. But it seems though that my mom gets nothing but bad news when she stays in this room, so I'm hoping the color change will bring a sea-change for her in that regard.

As the first strokes of the roller went on, I tried to fill them with warm and hopeful thoughts, but the Kilz was such a pain in the butt that I soon gave up and just wanted finished with the darn thing. So much for a sea change. My irritated mood might be more fitting, though! We didn't call my grandmother Eeyore for nothing.

We didn't stop at the walls in this room. Added a shelf for some books, and topped it with a sweet blue fan from etsy to replace the ceiling fan we took out. Switched out some dressers and gave the ladder back chair we use as a night stand new life with some silver spray paint. Alfie pointed out that it's nice to have a chair to put your jammies on, so in when another chair, and hey! What about a mirror? That might be a nice thing for guests to use. All it lacks is a flat screen tv and a mini fridge and people may never want to leave.

After I got past the irritated part of the project, I moved straight into worried (one of the 8 stages of painting {excited, undecided, resolved, excited (again) worried, tired, whiny and satisfied}). Was it too white? Was it not warm enough? Too like the trim? Does it look like we don't care about color? Because we really do care about color! When I thought about these walls in my mind, I was thinking about maybe Parisian apartment or country farmhouse. Spare, unadorned. Beauty in their simplicity. In the old part of our house the walls are heavily plastered, and I wanted that work to shine. A few weeks later we were painting the hall the same white, and when Neel was doing the hard ceiling part, he said, "I really like this color, it reminds me of the whitewashed walls on those houses we saw in Greece."

Okay. I think we got it right.