Decorating Daze

My elder Daughter buys me a subscription to a magazine called Canadian House and Home as a Christmas gift each year.  Not that I follow any of the advice, especially that which would lead to a lot of dusting and fussing.  (Size labels safety pinned to folded sheets? Not me!) Nor do I wish to buy extremely expensive paint in colours with names that bear little relation to the hue advertised, chandeliers that would take a day a month to keep cobweb free and kitchen cabinets with glass doors to show off my lack of organization. As fiction, however, it provides me with hours of fun.

When JG and I were married we set up housekeeping with a double bed box spring and mattress, a small chest of drawers, a kitchen table, and a whole lot of books. We had a broom, too, because I vividly recall it blowing off the roof of our station wagon, loaded with all our worldly goods, as we drove along the 401, moving from our student apartment to our first Real Home. This was a four room apartment in a walk-up building in Ville la Salle in Montréal, but it was a palace to me. It had a bedroom with a closet, a linen closet (with silverfish), a semi-enclosed kitchen and a living room, plus minuscule bathroom.  We needed a big furniture expansion to fit all this space. Because we had been married rather unconventionally, a lot of our wedding presents had been cash and so we were able to purchase a (cheap) new couch and chair, coffee table and end table. The couch and chair were upholstered in brown and beige vinyl and the futon style couch folded down to a single bed. We got six little legs to hold up the double bed mattress.

I was pretty impressed with this adult collection of worldly goods.

It lasted us through two more moves and two children, with the addition of a cheap melamine dining room set and a gift of hand-me-down curtains from my mother. One of my aunts provided baby furniture for the ED; I think my MIL came through with another crib and high chair for the younger girl and a working sewing machine. I bought JG a reclining chair at Eaton's scratch and dent outlet. I know my MIL gave me her youngest son's bunk beds when the time came to move the girls out of their cribs. The same aunt provided a couch and chair when JG finished his PhD and we moved again to a house with a finished basement. JG's sister found us a new (wait for it!) gold shag rug that you cleaned with a rake.  I think this style of décor is called Early Relative. (In the photo accompanying this post you can see the couch, the curtains and The Rug.)

The move mentioned above was to a city where JG had been offered a job with a real, substantial pay cheque. What a heady feeling! Our new house had two bedrooms, a second bathroom (oh joy!) and a big, fenced yard. Although the fence was chain link, not picket, we had arrived in suburbia. And after a couple of years of feeding a savings account we went out and purchased new living room furniture and a second hand dining room suite. It all matched! I bought a matching cover for JG's recliner, too. The girls were still in their uncle's bunk beds and using our original (now chipped) dresser, but I got curtain fabric and quilts that matched and dressed up their room with hanging bulletin boards covered in the curtain fabric; I think they even had a braided mat. Better Homes and Gardens had nothing on me.

With the addition of furniture and more adult fixings for the girls, this décor lasted until they both finished their undergraduate degrees and left home for good. The YD moved back to her home city to take a job, rented an apartment and JG rashly promised that she could have our living room couch and chairs and that I could have new stuff. The day before she came to get the living room suite I hastened to a furniture store and frantically identified a new couch and chairs. It was not until I got the whole shebang home that I realized that the colour that looked taupe in the store lighting was actually a pinkish purple. I was going to have to reorganize my whole colour scheme. I could have used decorating advice about then; instead I ended up lugging a sofa cushion around (with a friend in tow wheezing with suppressed mirth) to get a complementary colour for a new rug. Luckily, my mother's hand-me down curtains were not a bad match.

We moved all this stuff out here to our forever home. All except the drapes, since we did not plan to use any curtains except in the bedroom and for those I had a set that the ED no longer needed. When we finally got the interior of this house finished and painted (and what fun I had choosing paint and counter top colours and tile), we started shopping for real, forever, furniture, stuff that we could love and live with for the rest of our lives. And, amazingly, we had enough money that we could choose really good quality. I visited a lot of furniture stores and over the course of several years we accumulated what we have now. And it looks pretty good, if I do say so myself.

We have now lived here over fifteen years. I looked, really looked, at our bedroom the other day and realized that it badly needs painting. I also looked at the drapes. And I thought to myself, I will buy new ones. Not hand-me-down. Not cheap. And have a new colour of bedroom paint that tones with the new curtains. And maybe, just maybe, a rug beside the bed with a pattern on it.

You know, that magazine is inspiring, after all. Except ... shag rugs are back in style.

This is an original Canada Moms Blog by Mary G. When she is not out buying curtains, Mary G blogs at Them's My Sentiments.