the Cookbook Chronicles

Looking for a special gift for a friend or family member?

How about mixing up memories and menus to create a bespoke cookbook:

a collection of recipes shared by family and friends, liberally seasoned with photos.

Sound delicious? Follow along for the where and when and whatnots…

Where I started…

• I created my books at Shutterfly.com, but you can use any site that produces photo books. Save time by using a site with cookbook templates. My first cookbook was created in 2015, when Shutterfly was the only site I found with a cookbook template. 

• I recommend finding a site and sticking with it if there is a possibility you’ll make another book. Don’t waste precious time reinventing the charcuterie board, save your project! When you’re ready for volume two, copy the original and personalize the next edition.

 When…

• Perfect for bridal showers and wedding gifts

• Check the site you’re using for expected delivery dates and be prepared to add expedited or rush shipping fees to get it in time. You do NOT want to pour your heart and soul into a gift that does not arrive on time.

• Shutterfly has specials and sales regularly. I’ve been visiting the site to prep for this post and Shutterfly offers have been popping up in my social media left and right. Get your book compiled ASAP so you have breathing room to take advantage of special offers.

• Save this gift for last at the shower, it’s a show stopper!

How…

(note: see gallery below for illustration of many of the points that follow)

• Include a request for recipes and photos with shower invitations

• Set deadlines for guest submissions well in advance of the shower and pad your estimate with time for editing, formatting, proofreading, etc.

• Create a folder on your computer specifically for recipes and photos and upload files and photos to folder as you receive them

• Review the types of recipes you’ve received and make a loose outline to help structure your book

• My books followed a simple structure:

  • all included pages for: intro/dedication, attribution, main dishes, sides, treats and lots of photo pages.

  • later editions had edits and additions: salads to salads, sides, snacks; treats to desserts; drinks to liquid refreshment; breakfasty stuff, fun and weddings were added

  • 2nd and 3rd additions included images of associated invitations

  • family recipes were recycled in each book (unless someone sent something new) and photos of the new honoree replaced the previous

  • contributions from the other side were replaced in each edition, obvi

  • the same font was used for recipes in each edition, with changes to fonts of section titles and editorial comments

• There are lots of extras to spice up your book, watch for the discounts to make the bottom line palatable. These are the extras I used:

  • Extra pages - sometimes they’re unlimited or discounted

  • Hardcover binding for a durable, long lasting keepsake

  • Deluxe Layflat pages so the book opens flat, photo spreads are seamless across pages

  • Matte finish is better for wiping off spills, but you can’t write notes on them

  • Removing the Shutterfly logo

  • Gift box

How much for the magic…

I never know if people will gasp in horror or be totes okay with the cost of the book. My books ranged from $122 to $145, including discounts, tax and shipping. I’ve included the order info for each in the gallery below. I enjoyed both the process and the final product so much that it was definitely worth it to me.

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What prompted this creativity…

While I sometimes wish we’d had cell phone and digital cameras when my kids were little, I shudder to think about how many terabytes of storage I’d be paying for now, had that been the case.

I made albums the old-fashioned way: unedited prints of dubious quality inserted in plastic sleeves in binders picked up at Michael’s back in the ‘80s. At least, I did that for my older kids. When our youngest Kyle was born in 1989, the others’ albums were frozen in time at the ripe old ages of 10, 7 and 4. Kyle never let me forget that the older kids at least had photo albums.

When Kyle turned twenty-one, fueled by years of mom guilt mixed with expanding technology, I scanned old prints, report cards, school photos, certificates, recital programs and memorabilia of all sorts, uploaded them to a photo site and spent weeks arranging and editing to produce a hard bound volume chronicling the first twenty one years of her life. K is for Kyle.

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When the book was finished I had a much better understanding of the time and effort it takes to create such a work. I resolved to make albums for my other kids. Some day.

Years passed, as they are wont to do, but without another album being produced.

When our older daughter Ali was getting married, it seemed a golden opportunity to make her an album. Except I hadn’t forgotten the effort involved. And I had amassed considerable digital clutter in five years – more bytes than experience had taught me I could comfortably chew. When I was planning her bridal shower, I had an idea to combine the spirit of an album, a collection of photos, with the old bridal shower classic of guests sharing a recipe card with the Bride-to-Be. We could create a bespoke cookbook.

Invitations to Ali’s shower included a request for recipes, with bonus points if the guests included pictures of themselves with Ali.

My daughter Kyle helped with entering, editing, and proofreading recipes. I collected photos of Ali with recipe contributors, as well as a healthy selection of photos spanning the years up to that point. It was a loose compilation of her life, interspersed with the recipes shared by her family and friends and it was a bigger hit than anticipated.

When Kyle got married a few years later, Ali and I pulled together a similar cookbook for her, an outpouring of love from family and friends dating from her 21st birthday to her marriage.

My younger son Jason got married last summer and Ali and Kyle and I compiled a book for him and his bride, Coco. Coco’s family and friends sent recipes and photos and we had piles of photos of Jason and Coco over the ten years they’d been together. The book is a sweet celebration of the two of them.

My oldest son Adam married long before this idea occurred to me, so I’m not sure what shape his album will take. At the rate I’m going though, he probably shouldn’t look for it before his forty-fifth birthday. Maybe fiftieth.

Serving Size, Milestones and the Life Expectancy of a Cookie

Long before the nutrition label was even a glimmer in the FDA’s eye, my mother developed her own system for serving sizes. Cookies, for example: one for your mouth and one for each hand, ergo, three cookies is a serving. That’s the system under which I lived until adulthood when, rank having its privileges, serving size was what I wanted it to be. Except in front of my kids. I confess, I imposed the tyranny of the three cookie rule on my children, even as I swept the crumbs of my own cookie excess under the proverbial rug.

At least until I heard the first stirrings of discontent. There were grumblings about the injustice of 12-year-olds and 6-year-olds getting the same number of cookies. Didn’t I realize they had different capacities and caloric needs?!

And so, after some negotiation, a new distribution system was established. It was decreed that once a subject achieved the milestone of double digits (age 10), they would graduate from a three cookie serving, hereafter known as the Three Cookie Club, and move to the Four Cookie Club. The peasants rejoiced and there was much anticipation of tenth birthdays, while those under the age of ten looked longingly at their elder brother’s enhanced cookie status.

I got to thinking about Cookie Club logistics while brainstorming gift ideas for my father-in-law, who recently celebrated a major milestone birthday. I wanted to give him ninety of something. My husband’s father loves my mother-in-law, golf, the Yankees and sweets. Though I’m not 100% sure of the actual ranking.

He and my mother-in-law just celebrated 65 years of wedded bliss, he plays golf three times a week, the Yankees are still in it and if I’ve heard him say, “I’ll have my dessert in the other room, Marlene!” once, I’ve heard him say it a thousand times. So baked goods seemed like a good option. And that made me wonder what level of cookie nirvana a nonagenarian would attain.  

The Ninety Cookie Club was born.

Although ninety cookies at once would be a lot. Even for me.

I worked up a plan for a Cookie-a-Day for ninety days: seven cookies delivered every Sunday for 13 weeks. My husband thought it sounded like a lot of work (he knew he was the clean up committee), but I had that figured out, too. I’d make a batch of cookies, pack up a week’s worth and freeze the rest - guaranteed inventory!

And that’s where the life expectancy of a cookie comes into play.

Cryogenics aside, no substantive discussion of cookie longevity can be had without knowing what kind of cookies are on the table. With all due respect to the artisans who make the fancy sugar cookies with royal icing, those are show cookies, not eating cookies. I’m a basic baker with a fondness for old school favorites. What these sweet little comfort foods lack in looks, I try to make up for in packaging.

Based on experience and my mother-in-law’s advice, I started with a short list of cookies I knew my father-in-law would enjoy. Most fall within my cookie repertoire and are likely to survive the freezer.

As you might imagine, I’ve dedicated myself to some serious cookie R&D in the past several weeks. I have the pounds to prove it.

Here’s what I’ve whipped up so far:

• Week 1: Broke a cardinal rule of baking-for-others and mixed up a variety I’d never made before - without even doing a test batch! - Coconut Macaroons, his favorite. Yes, there’s room for improvement, but they were edible. I may practice perfecting them for the final week.

• Week 2: My mother’s Spice Cookies, some people call them Molasses Cookies. They’re one of my favorites, spicy goodness you can count on.

• Week 3: Brownie Bites, suggested by my mother-in-law. Just have to remember not to overfill the mini muffin cups – just a tablespoon of batter per mini muffin cup for a perfect bite, not a chocolate eruption.

• Week 4: Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, another staple from my Mom. Good to remember to err on the less cooked side with these. I might’ve overcooked one sheet, but had enough good cookies for Sunday delivery. Phew.

After four weeks of old school, I was itching to experiment, so I googled recipes for “crispy, chewy cookies.” Pays to do your homework because…

• Week 5: Lemon Crinkle Cookies. To Die For. I think they’re my new favorite. I even made them twice more that week outside of the NCC.

• Week 6:  Date Bars. If you want to get into the dating pool, this is the place to jump in. Huge hit.

I’ve been baking every Sunday morning and making up a package for my father-in-law (more than 7 cookies, so he can share with his lovely wife), attaching ribbons and a tag with a relevant picture and notation of the week’s variety. I drop them off on Sunday afternoon and get to enjoy a visit, just me and my in-laws, which is really the best part.

It should be noted that I’ve tested all the aforementioned recipes to see that they freeze well. I can state unequivocally that they are delicious and entirely edible right out of the freezer.

Whether they actually hold up after thawing will require further research.

Need a cookie fix? I can hook you up! Links in images below and in text above.

Which is your favorite?

Coconut Macaroons

Spice Cookies

Brownie Bites

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Lemon Crinkle Cookies

Date Bars

This one's for the birds

Another in what appears to be a series.

To: The usual suspects
Subject: You heard it here first

Last Monday it felt so good to string more than three sentences together, I told myself I was going to do that every Monday, good, bad or ugly, to develop writing habits and work on….um…oh, yeah. Focus.

Yesterday I was having a mood.

I was deep into it, you know when I get so irritated that I start cleaning? I channeled the energy into cleaning my office so I could sit down to write, when I noticed a text from Ali.

how are you?

i'm having a mood

wanna talk about it?

nah. i don't like you to see me having a mood

ok. well if you change your mind i'm just having coffee and folding laundry and avoiding things to do

 Avoiding Things To Do. My MO. Which is generally followed by self-recrimination about not having gotten it done.

And guilt that I have passed it on.

I changed my mind.

During the on-again-off-again convo that ensued, I considered the cyclic nature to my mood. In days of yore, maybe it was hormones, maybe an occupational hazard of zookeeping. Since those ships have sailed, I think it’s more like seasonal affective disorder, only counter intuitively, it happens in the spring.

I thought back to this time last year. I had a mood that manifested itself in a frenetic day of window washing.

Avoiding what was already on my To Do list, I rolled up my sleeves, hauled out the ladder and frittered the day away with Windex and a squeegee. In a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished twist, this resulted in an extended reenactment of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Also the period in which I was dating prolifically.

Your father maintains the birds had been out to get me since I had (with callous disregard and malice aforethought) evicted them without notice from the awning, but hello?! They were attacking the freshly washed windows of his office.

Dude. No Loitering.

But it ultimately became a problem for both of us, since they started thumping into the window super early in the mornings, and the windows to his office are below the bedroom windows on my side of the bed. The assault continued for weeks. Part of the fallout was the not-inconsequential incontinence which struck the bird each time it struck the window.

In any case, the attacks led me down a rabbit hole, not unlike the one I find myself in at the moment…

Diversion One: google “birds flying into window repeatedly”

According to MassAudobon.org, it’s not an uncommon occurrence as certain species turn territorial at nesting time.

“When a bird, searching for a nesting site, accidently sees its image in a reflective surface on its territory, it mistakes it for a rival and tries to drive the “interloper” away. This activity may continue throughout the breeding season, usually from May to early August, often with a pause as the birds move to a new location to start the next brood.”

 We waited it out.

 …a quick side trip to find Ali a photo of the window - illustrating the unfathomable number of times the bird had hit this window. How many times do you have to fly into a window before you realize it’s a reflection of you?

somebody was not getting the message.

The next diversion google: “did Albert Einstein really define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”

Thank goodness for 12 Famous Quotes That Always Get Misattributed from businnessinsider.com. In true rabbit hole fashion,  ol’ Al didn’t make the top 11, so it was a hot minute before they pointed me to Rita Mae Brown and a Wikiquote entry…

“Brown did include this quote in her book Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68, but it appears she was just paraphrasing a quote that had already been written elsewhere. The earliest known appearance of a similar quote is the "approval version" of the Narcotics Anonymous "Basic Text" released in November 1981, which included the quote "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results."

That was a circuitous route to…where were we?

Right, my inner Stanley Kowalski screaming “I coulda been a contender!”

Along the way, Ali said

 maybe we’re just wired this way. i think we have to accept that that's just part of our process instead of trying to change it. maybe. or at least while changing, accepting it instead of being hard on ourselves

And then Ali said another thing.

i LOVE you just the way you are and wouldnt want you to change a thing. all the pieces parts are you. think of how you would talk to a friend, or to me.

And I said,

where have i heard that before

And then she said,

i say b/c it's good advice. it's so easy to be kind and loving to everybody else

and then we're like totally bitches to ourselves

I hadn’t wanted Ali to see me in a mood. In retrospect though, sharing highlighted how empathetic my people are. I appreciated her insight and perspective.

I confess though, that I was frustrated this morning. I had thought I was gonna hop on the treadmill and crank out a quick piece for you guys, suitable for framing, so to speak. I wanted to keep the promise I made to myself last week - that I would write again this week, but I had nuthin’.

Then I opened my email and there was the Daily Om: “Calling on Friends”

“When we include our friends in the full story of our life, we build authentic relationships in which we can be who we truly are.

When we are going through a difficult time, we may hesitate to call even our best friends because we don't want to burden them with our troubles. This can be especially true if we've been going through a series of challenges, and we're starting to feel as if we sound like a broken record.”

It seems we’ve come full circle.

Did I mention that I washed the windows again last week?

This just happened to Dad’s window.

sometimes you’re the bird. sometimes you’re the window.

Love,

Yo Mama

All that remains...

I was writing the email to my kids which follows, as I stepped on the treadmill this morning. There is no small irony in the fact that I was unable to walk and thumb-type at the same time. My workout waited until I pressed the ‘Send’ button.

It struck me then, like an errant piece of cardboard upside the head, that if a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, perhaps this is a signal that my writer’s block is on its last leg. A literal bit of irony as this is the first thing that I have written, beyond a postcard or an Instagram caption, in over a year.

I’ve taken it a step further and added the crime scene photo that inspired the title at the end of the post. Thanks for reading.

To: the usual suspects
Subject: It was seeming weird

To not send something to you first thing in the morning now that my Lenten observance is at end.

Then I opened an email about guided meditation...

“A guided meditation uses the sound of a person's voice to direct you through an inner process of relaxing your body and shifting your mind's focus. The voice may be a person in the room with you or a recording--even something downloaded from the internet--and it is generally spoken in soothing, soft tones.”

The article went on to say, “Whether you are familiar with guided meditation or you are a beginner, being guided gives you the opportunity to benefit from the insight of others.” And, “Guided meditation allows you to learn from others in a way that is similar to ones used by ancients the world over.”

This all made me feel like maybe I had invented guided meditation, seeing as I’m ancient and I’m pretty sure I’m at least an occasional voice in your head.

Anyway, the only thing I can give you to meditate on today is an illustration of my deeply ingrained thought processes, which may or may not have influenced your development. My apologies.

You’ll recall the story of the cockroach in my first apartment. The first cockroach...the one I understood to be a cockroach on a primitive level, since I had heretofore been blessed not to have real world knowledge. And how I slayed the cockroach with a package of tomatoes and using said tomato package, unceremoniously guided its body to the drain in the kitchen sink, whereupon I turned on the floodgates of the faucet and flushed it to a watery grave.

Some part of my brain remembered that cockroaches had survived when dinosaurs hadn’t, so I followed up with a pot of boiled water in case the room temperature tap water, like that ancient meteor hit, was survivable.

Now, y’all know if there were cockroaches in this house I would not be living here. I have, however, made exceptions for the occasional centipede.

Last night I was throwing some laundry in. Workout clothes and a fleece. I was in the process of tossing in a sheet of detergent (yay for Earthy friendly detergent sheets) when a centipede scurried across my fleece as it sat in the tub of the machine!

(My skin crawls as I type this.)

What to do?! I mean cause normally I wash the delicates on cold but I was thinking maybe a centipede could survive a delicate cycle.

Age old conundrum.

I opted for delicates on heavy using warm water.

When the cycle was done, I gingerly approached the washer. Lifted the lid. Scanned for movement. Sensing none, I used the universal pincer hold to pick up a corner of the fleece with the tippy tips of my right thumb and forefinger, slowly pulling it up and out of the washer.

I held it over the floor...and shook.

And out dropped a wholly formed, freshly washed centipede.

And me without my shoes.

We’ll never know if he was an arthropod in an arrested state of animation or just a well turned out corpse.

I dared not grab a tissue to pick him up and risk him reanimating in my hand. It was a super earth friendly detergent sheet in his spa treatment, not toxic chemicals, I probably didn’t have to worry about him morphing into a horror flick monster and attacking me when I came to empty the dryer...but could I take that chance?

No. No I could not.

From the corner of my eye I spotted the cardboard insert from a recently purchased set of sheets.

The coup de centipede. His Waterloo of boiling water, as it were.

I mopped up his remains with a paper towel and deposited him in the trash.

Don’t think I didn’t look to make sure that paper towel was still in the trash this morning.

And now that I’ve shifted your mind’s focus, enjoy these scrabbled eggs and have a great day.

Love,

Mom

Not only was I without my shoes, but without my camera. I couldn’t run to get it for fear the miscreant might shake off his lethargy and skedaddle while I was gone. So I dropped the cardboard bomb.

I discovered all that remains this morning.

that centipede doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

The Tooth Fairy: Policy and Practice

The continuing saga of opposites attracting and

someone being lax in his due diligence.

If someone had asked me, I would have told them that dark chocolate covered caramels were the key to my heart.

There must have been a second set of keys, because for years my husband gifted me with cashew clusters. Milk chocolate, even. Eww.

Young and in love, I appreciated the gesture so much that it took awhile for me to tell him that he was doing it wrong. That he was the only one eating them and that they lasted forEVER were apparently insufficient clues.

The truth is, he wasn’t a candy guy and he married a woman born with a full set of sweet teeth. Although I don’t have all of them now, of course. There is natural fall out from a steady diet of Milk Duds and Tootsie Rolls. Sure, you can fill in the holes, but recently I’ve found that even modern dental technology is not proof against candy. Or corn chips, for that matter.

my idea of a balanced diet

In the ‘60s, dental technology was rudimentary.  We didn’t have molar sealants and theme park pediatric dental centers. The fight against tooth decay consisted of annual school presentations wherein a dental hygienist passed out “disclosing” tablets to show us where we were missing with the brush. Then we walked around with pink teeth for the rest of the day.

My mom was making ends meet by the skin of her teeth, and that did not cover regular check-ups for my sister’s and mine. Maybe I blocked more of them out, but I remember only one visit to the dentist before I was eleven. If you’ve seen the movie Marathon Man, trust me when I tell you that the scene with Szell asking Dustin Hoffman’s character, “Iz it safe?!” was culled from my repressed memories. Asking me if it’s safe will trigger my PTSD from drilling with no novocaine, which must have cost extra.

Dental care became regular when I was eleven and my mom remarried. Our two-parent, two-income household included dental insurance and for a few years dental care was so regular as to be weekly. We’d leave our six-month cleaning and check up with a schedule of weekly appointments to address the years of neglect.

Okay, so I have a sweet tooth, but I also came from questionable dental stock. As legend has it,  my dad took my mom out for pizza on their first date. My dad picked up a slice and bit in. My mother followed suit – and blistered the roof of her mouth, unaware that my dad had a full set of dentures shielding his own. Apparently the Air Force had a scorched earth policy on tooth decay, hence my dad’s fake choppers by the time he was twenty. My mother had her own dental issues, so we kids were doomed from the start.

Maybe my husband bought me candy I didn’t like thinking it would save on dental bills. If so, it didn’t work. The first year we were married I had to have a tooth pulled and a bridge made. In the years since, I’ve had root canals done in four states, implants, replants, gum surgery and veneers. We’ve put at least seven kids through college. Three of them belonged to our family dentist. My husband has good teeth and has always taken care of them. My issues made us super conscientious about our kids having regular check-ups, fluoride treatments, sealants and of course, braces. 

Sure, they lost teeth in the normal course of events - and were fairly reimbursed by the Tooth Fairy. One of them, perhaps understanding at a tender age that medical school was expensive, left her tooth with a request for twenty bucks. And damned if the guy on duty, captivated by her moxie, didn’t drop a twenty spot under her pillow. Never send a man to do a Tooth Fairy’s job. Her next tooth was accompanied by a request for $100.

Once, my younger son really lost a tooth, swallowing it along with the tender kernels from the ear of corn he was eating. Rather than wait for it to…reappear to collect his cash, I encouraged him to write a note to the Tooth Fairy, explaining the situation. It was a precious note, embellished with serifs and flourishes, evidence of his burgeoning creativity underscoring his toothless plea. The Tooth Fairy, an eminently empathetic sprite, left the cash and kept the note.

Beyond the natural attrition there were typical orthodontic issues, but overall they’ve been fortunate to inherit strong teeth from their dad. At least one of the four has never had a cavity, despite also inheriting at least one of my sweet teeth. 

They do all like their candy. 

Still, it came as a surprise the day I overheard my younger son telling a friend that the Tooth Fairy had left him a bag of M&Ms. Seriously?!

I called him aside.

“Jason Charles Cerutti,” I said, 

“The Tooth Fairy most certainly did NOT leave a bag of M&Ms under your pillow.” 

Beyond creativity and a sweet tooth, this one also inherited a tendency to sink his teeth into things. Rest assured that the Tooth Fairy did not leave a bag of M&Ms under this kid’s pillow. I’ll spare you the several minutes of “did, toos” and “did, nots” and wave my wand on over to the part where he said,

“How do you know?”

I marched him up the stairs, opened my box of keepsakes, pulled out a folded scrap of paper and handed it to him.

He read…

“Dear tooth

fareiy i was

EatiNG My

CORN oN The

COBB AND I

took A Bite

AND I SWOLOD

MY tooth”

He stared at the note. Then, looking up at me, eyes wide with wonder, said,

“You’re the Tooth Fairy?!”

Okay, not like I’d just outed Santa, but like…he thought I was the Tooth Fairy.

I hoped for a second that I could get him to believe that I also really did have eyes in the back of my head, but the moment passed. 

It was one of those “best of times, worst of times” moments in parenting. For one shining moment I experienced the wonder of my boy thinking I was truly magical, followed quickly by the realization that in being right, I had stomped all over that childhood innocence. I choose to treasure the shining moment. And I think he’s forgiven me.

I conspiratorially shared that story with my oldest granddaughter, Morgan, last fall after she explained to me that she knew what was what with Santa Claus. I thought of it again last week when I was FaceTiming with her and her siblings. I was angling my face to the camera to hide the gap in my teeth - left by the loss of a veneer on a corn chip the day before. I showed them the loose veneer, stowed in a ziploc bag to bring to the dentist, and told them I was going to put it under my pillow for the Tooth Fairy.

angled to mind the gap

I thought of it yet again a few days later when the crown on one of my implants came out while I was eating some Mike & Ikes.

On the bright side, we found a wonderful new dentist shortly after moving here.

Looks like I’m about to put her kids through college.

Maybe I am the Tooth Fairy, after all.

Unfinished Business, A Love Story

I don’t know if my husband understood what he was getting into when he married me.

I mean, my mom sat him down and did his astrological chart the first time she met him. Whether you’re into astrology or not, that has to make you wonder what’s swimming in the gene pool. There were also pretty clear early indicators that I was going to be the Oscar to his Felix, though the whole “spray painting of dressers in bedrooms” thing never came up in Pre Cana.

But marry me he did, and he has been my rock, steadfast and true, the calm voice of reason, ever since.

One of the first times he went shopping with me, I was buying a robe for my mother. We were chatting as I got to the register and pulled a crumpled wad of bills from the front pocket of my jeans. We both watched as a few bills floated to the floor. He looked at the wad, he looked at the floor, he looked at me.

“You are not taking care of the money,” he said.

And he didn’t blink when he found me stripping an old dresser in the tiny dining room of our first apartment. He obligingly took a ‘before’ picture and cheerfully ate meals on the living room floor until the project was done. That phase of it, anyway. There was a bit of scope creep because the dresser wasn’t big enough for both of us. We found a “budget-friendly” unfinished maple dresser that I planned to finish to “match” the old one.

1981. That’s me…the Vanna White of dresser display.

The new dresser was not the success of its suite mate. The poly went on too thick, dripped and ran and…yuck. It was sanded down and prepped for recoating, but that was preempted by life. If you had told my 22 year-old-self that I’d be a grandmother before this thing got finished, I’d have told you to lay off the sauce, kid.

To paraphrase Piglet, “the haycorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I just wish I’d gotten my mother’s astrological DNA instead of her ‘unfinished project’ gene.

The old dresser still looks good and has been in constant use since it was refinished. The unfinished-unfinished one? That dresser is the mother, nay…the grandmother of unfinished projects. It’s been an ugly ass bane of my existence for decades. Finish it or get off the pot, you say? Every time it’s about to get axed, it wrangles a last minute stay of execution and gets exiled to the basement or wherever we need some functional, if ugly, storage.

this would be a fun picture to recreate.
1983. We had just moved into our first house, I’d long since given up re-refinishing and just put the hardware back on.

When we needed something in the little guest room of our new(ish) old house, it made its way up the stairs and across the hall from our room. It taunts me regularly. A couple of weeks ago when a client asked me about chalk paint, I dedicated its body to science.

2020. Go away or I will taunt you a second time!

I’ve refinished lots of furniture, but never used chalk paint. This was a prime opportunity to experiment, share some insight and, one might hope, produce some content.

For the uninitiated, Chalk Paint® was invented by Annie Sloan thirty years ago, when she wanted a furniture paint that required little to no prep and a fast dry time, in order to turn projects around in a day. Named Chalk Paint® because of its texture and ultra flat finish, it’s been replicated by many over thirty years, but Annie Sloan’s remains the preeminent brand.

Perfect for the dresser that’s been waiting 40 years to get turned around in an afternoon.

Okay, but at $38 per liter, it’s also the champagne of decorative paint. And you can’t get it just anywhere. Online, sure. But if you want it now, you need a local, hand-picked, certified, grade A stockist.

When now is 7 AM and the budget for the dresser is more Bud Lite than Veuve Cliquot, you cross the parking lot from the gym to Home Depot and take your chances with a $20 quart of Behr “Chalk Decorative Paint”.

There are 45 postage stamp sized paint chips in the Behr brochure, a subset of the 218 available colors. You can’t see the remaining 173 colors before you buy. Not in the mood to throw caution (and twenty bucks) to the wind, I chose from among the mini chips. Fossil Gray seemed appropriate for the albatross in the guest room.

for realz yo.

My husband wasn’t surprised to find me in the guest room laying drop cloths and removing hardware from the dresser. Well, maybe he was a little surprised about the drop cloths. I told him not to talk to me because I was going to be recording a video of the process. My friend Darla has encouraged me to do this because video is the social media wave of the future.

Trust me, unless you’re looking for an answer to the question, “Does this dresser make my butt look big?” don’t do it.

After giving the dresser no prep other than a good scrub, I brushed on the first coat of paint. I didn’t love the color, but it was going over ebony stain, so I reserved judgment. Sadly, after two coats of Fossil Gray, the situation had not improved.

I’d learned something about the paint and the process, but I was left with a dresser I found more offensive than before the “easy afternoon makeover” had morphed into three trips to Home Depot, five kinds of replacement hardware from Amazon and $147. At least $47 more than we’d paid for the dresser forty years ago.

So maybe I was a little anxiety ridden when I started Googling my options.

The first thing I realized was that chalk painting is a cult. If you find yourself in the company of one of its members, don’t stand still or you’re likely to be chalked, distressed and waxed, though not necessarily in that order.

Experiencing a sample of the blogs and videos reminded me of the furniture antiquing craze my mother fell prey to in the early 1970s. Whether it was a compulsion induced by paint fumes or she didn’t want to waste the product, by the time she came to her senses, a set of shelves, a stool, her sewing machine cabinet and the upright piano fell victim to the peacock blue paint and brown glaze meant to “unify” the disparate pieces of furniture in our dining room.

1973. Girl with her mother’s blue piano.

My search was fortuitously interrupted when I accidentally checked Facebook. I saw that there’s a new documentary out called Gray is the New Blonde. Watching the trailer got me thinking that dressers are like women. Some look amazing when they go gray.

Me and my dresser? Not so much.

hardware trials on the ol’ fossil.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s one thing to be a grandma, quite another to look like a grandma, so I’m gonna keep touching up those roots. As for the dresser, Fossil Gray was looking a bit like embalming fluid. It needed a shot of color, but I couldn’t find one that would inject life and work with the rug in that room.

All this talk about grandmas reminded me of my grandmother’s desk just down the hall. It has wear and tear, but it’s aged quite charmingly and it would work really well in this little room.

If I swapped it with my Fossil Gray friend, I could paint her something that would work really well in her new space. Something trendy and chic, like Pantone’s Color of the Year, Classic Blue.

It was nine at night. A good time, it turns out, to finish the unfinished business, because I’d discovered that Waverly Inspirations® Chalk Acrylic Paint was on the shelf at Walmart. And they’re open till 11.

A proprietary mix of Ocean and Ink. Maybe four parts to one. Measuring is for wusses.

My husband was traveling when I had this epiphany. When he got back home, he noticed that my grandmother’s desk had taken up residence in the guest room. He said that he thought it looked good in there and casually asked where the chair had come from.

Yesterday he finally noticed the finished dresser as he walked into my office.

“Hey, wow! This really looks great!”

I started to warn him as he tugged on one of the new drawer pulls, that I hadn’t fixed the drawer stops, but he caught it before it fell out.

”Still a piece of shit,” he said. “But it looks really good.”

Two hearts, living in just one mind.

The chickens came first.

They didn’t cross the road. They paved it.

Ever try to kick back and relax on a holiday weekend? You’re just getting your chill on when your daughter, who’s still away at school, calls to tell you she’s at the flea market and they have the cutest little bantam chicks!

 And you say, “No. No. A thousand times, No. Do not bring home any bantam chicks.” 

And the following week when you go to pick her up at school, are you surprised that she has a bantam chick? 

The arguments are specious. It’s just a teeny, tiny baby chicken! They don’t get big! They can lay eggs – free, fresh eggs, Mom! When we go back to school in the fall Bernie (Bernie?! what about the eggs?) can join the flock on campus. Just for the summer, Mom!

I like chicken as much as the next person, preferably grilled or stir-fried, not pecking around on my kitchen floor. It was 2007. Avian Flu was a hot topic. According to NewScientist, it was raising “…fears of public health experts who worry that human poverty and millions of backyard poultry could combine to produce many human infections and potentially a human pandemic virus.”

Okay, so it was one chicken in an arguably affluent suburb, but...still.

And there was my daughter, chick in hand, willing Bernie to be cute enough to crack my resolve. Permission? Forgiveness? Minor details.

Clearly another of those incidents under the umbrella of my mother’s common refrain, “Just wait till you have children of your own.”

Once home, it was immediately obvious that Bernie could not stay cooped up in a box. Father and daughter went out to pick up a birdcage, chicken feed and wood shavings to catch the droppings and ‘control odor’. And hopefully stem the tide of  pandemic, as well.

 Soon after,  the friend with whom she’d hatched this plot called to say her mother wouldn’t let her keep her chicken.

 Imagine that.

Our flock doubled in size. Bernie and Gilbert were small, but not compatible with 24-hour lock up. I’m here to tell you that those ‘odor controlling’ wood shavings might work with hamsters, but chicken poop? No sir. Free ranging was not a possibility, so our hero engineered an alternative. A project that started with chicken wire around the base of the old play fort, grew as the perils of nature revealed themselves. It included plastic fencing, twist ties, a cover and a broom. Keeping the chickens in was a concern, but keeping the pillagers and plunderers out was the real challenge. Chipmunks love chicken feed, squirrels are not the escape artists you might imagine and hawks are always looking for a free meal.

 The summer passed slowly.

 The birds slept in a cage in our daughter’s room at night, enjoyed periodic bouts of free ranging in the mulch beds and spent the day in the makeshift coop. We kept watch and defended against birds of prey by waving the broom. We adjusted to the new world order  as we anticipated the day the birds would be roosting elsewhere.

 Mid August we had devastating news from school: the campus flock had been decimated by foxes. Such is the free-range life, but per the overseer of the grounds, Bernie and Gilbert would not be accepted for matriculation in the fall.

 Mom! How can you abandon defenseless chickens?!

 I don’t know, honey, but whether they relocate to a new home or a platter with a side of coleslaw, they are not staying here.

Her pleas to Save the Chickens posted on the school’s electronic bulletin board were answered with dark humor and thankfully, an alumna who, having smuggled a kitten into her dorm back in the day, was open to fostering a couple of chicks.

 I wasn’t sorry to see them go. But I wasn’t sorry they’d come to live with us, either. I was one with the absurdity and camaraderie of Team Chicken.

 It was several years before our daughter brought home another chicken. Just like that, our flock doubled in size.

 I drove her to the hospital and was with her when her little boy was born. I’d been through labor and delivery a few times myself, so I expected the routine. But this was my first time to be wholly present, to witness this miracle with total clarity and awareness. It imprinted on my heart as surely as that baby chicken imprinted on his momma. My husband arrived at the hospital moments after the little chick was born. Team Chicken reunited under new leadership: Team Jack.

 We didn’t have to build anything new, just reconfigure rooms to accommodate the new family. My desk became a baby changing station. Baby paraphernalia appeared; gates were installed; bumpers applied. Outlet covers bought by the gross.

The baby slept in a crib in his mother’s room at night, enjoyed free ranging in the house and the yard, with appropriate baby gates and safety equipment in place, and he grew and grew and grew. We loved, nurtured and cared for him alongside of his Mom and adjusted to the new world order without concern for the future.

Five years passed with lightning speed.

When we saw the future coming, I thought we were prepared for it. When they signed the lease on the apartment, it loomed. But they moved slowly, dribs and drabs of building their new nest as schedules allowed.

Last week they flew the coop in earnest.

 I was not sorry to see them go. I was devastated.

 I gave in to grief last week, because…how could I not? I watched that boy hatch. We’ve spent five years loving, nurturing, protecting him. I think this is something of what a non-custodial parent might feel after divorce, life shifts with an intensity you can’t anticipate. Seeing the empty places where his dresser and toys were brings the hole in my heart into painful focus.

We’re working on a new world order. I’ll still be support staff; Jack and Papa will still have weekly Boys’ Night; we’ll still do church and brunch with the family on Sundays. We will adjust.

 It was sad to see them go, but I’m happy for them and their very bright future. And so thankful for the past five years and the laughter and joy that filled this home.

 After a week, I’ve begun to appreciate that there may be life after baby chickens.

 My husband and I have been raising them for forty years and it looks like we finally have the nest to ourselves. Fortunately, we still like each other, so we’ve got that going for us. I see possibilities for using my time for things other than taking care of hatchlings.

 I couldn’t help but smile when Jack recently asked his Mom if they could bring Sparkle, the class hamster, home for April vacation. I realize now that there are two sides to the coin of my mother’s admonishment, “Just wait till you have children of your own.” Not just a warning, but a wish.

Nesting Instincts and Echoes

There are plenty of times I look back on my childhood and adolescence and think, “What the hell was my mother thinking?!

Circumstances this week bring to mind the time my mother said, “Sure you can paint the dresser.”

In my bedroom. With red paint.

Spray paint.

While the incident probably accounts for more than a few of my lost brain cells, it undoubtedly also informed a life of decorating risks and rewards.

It started with a small three-drawer chest, black, with simple line carvings highlighted in gold paint, and gold circle pulls…maybe 3” in diameter, two per drawer. I don’t recall if much prep went into the dresser beyond removing the pulls and a light sanding. I do know that I was scrupulous, in the way a 16-year-old girl with zero tolerance for delayed gratification can be, in prepping the painting theatre. Forty-five years ago there wasn’t a Home Depot stocked with blue painter’s tape and plastic drop cloths, there was only old sheets and newspapers. And a little collateral damage on a garment bag.

It’s the garment bag that’s indelibly etched on my mind, much as the red paint was indelibly etched on it. Extra long to encase a prom gown, it dragged on the floor a bit as it hung from the closet rod. It fell victim to the fine mist of over-spray that swirled and eddied under the closet door, depositing cherry red sprinkles on the floor and the garment bag that lay upon it. 

Probably my mom got upset about the floor. But, come on, it was in the closet. And, hello?! Who lets their kid spray paint a piece of furniture in the house already?

there’s no photographic evidence of the original, but here’s evidence that I learned from experience, when I recently painted my older daughter’s hope chest, in her living room, with pretty substantial prep of the area.

And a brush.

I think of this now, because the End Times are coming, presaged by the Pinterest and Instagram pix my engaged daughter is sending me of mismatched chairs spray painted various shades of green.

The End Times are coming, because my daughter, her son and her fiancé signed a lease on an apartment. She is in full Nesting Mode. 

Over the past five years, as anyone who will stand still long enough to let me tell them…and let’s be real, provide copious photographic evidence…I’ve been blessed to attend the birth of my grandson, to witness an incredible bonding of mother and son, to watch a beautiful baby boy grow into a funny, sweet, uh…let’s say persistent, rough and tumble, compassionate human being. My husband and I have been privileged to watch our daughter blossom in motherhood and we’ve been so honored to be integral parts of our grandson’s formative years.

Parents and adult children living together can be a challenge, but I like to think we’ve all risen to it. Probably we could have done better, but I think we’ve done pretty okay. If anyone asks, I would say communication is, as in most areas of life, the key to any sort of success.

I will miss the easy camaraderie and the comfort of the rhythm of our days. I will miss having her as back up if I hear a noise in the night when we’re home alone. I will miss her alternately being my enforcer (really hiding the Oreos) and being my enabler (hiding them in plain sight). I will miss her support and encouragement in all things and her ability to know just the wine I want when I want it. I will miss her proofreading my essays, because I know they’re good if they make her cry.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

I will not tell you all of the things I won’t miss, because that would ruin the flow of my story.

As for my Jack…I will miss everything. Everything. From spontaneous “I love you, Groms” to 5:45 am calls of “Is it time to get up?” I will miss him sauntering through our bedroom at 6:30 in the morning on his way to use our potty – when there’s a bathroom right next to his room. I will miss his love of cuddling and the way he has to divide up his time between his people as we watch Fixer Upper before bed. The way he’ll ask me to read Sandra Boynton’s Perfect Piggies, “…but don’t sing it, Grom.” And in the next breath will ask me to sing the Armor Hot Dog Song.
Everything, 24/7.

My first picture with Jack

If you ever have opportunity to live with your grandchildren, take it. There is something incredibly special about the bond, the depth of love combined with the lack of responsibility that is precious and priceless. Although to be sure, I have both worried over him more and taken much better care of him than my own children. When caring for mine, I had to answer to me. When caring for Jack, I have to answer to Momma Bear.

Jack enjoys his first Celtics game with Papa.

I think a measure of our success as a multi-generational family is that I don’t want them to go. 

But I don’t want them to stay, either.

I mean, I do. But I don’t. A twisted microcosm of the roots/wings phenomena. 

It’s a time for letting go I have somehow not prepared myself for. As I pondered this late last night, in the recesses of my mind I could hear the faint echo of my mother telling me to “Let go and let God.”

I think, I hope, I know that my daughter knows how much I love her. And her little boy, too. I think she knows because when each of my grandchildren has been born, I have thought, “There! Now, finally, that new parent knows how I feel about them.” And in grand-parenthood, the depths of love in the relationships I was so fortunate to have with my grandmothers becomes clear.

My daughter knows she’s taking huge pieces of my heart with her, as she moves literally, just blocks away.

But I’m still not letting her spray paint any chairs in this house.

new roots, new wings

Roots, Wings and Transatlantic Flights

Hi. My name is Jeri and I’m a mother. 

Forty years ago, after I tried it ‘just once’, I was hooked. I spent the next ten years turning them out like a PEZ dispenser. 

The thing is, I’m not a kid person. Kids don’t gravitate to me. I’m not fun or whimsical. Other people need to see the baby, need to hold the baby. Not me, I’m kind of take it or leave it. Well, unless it’s mine. Before I had kids, I had amorphous dreams of something like…I don’t know, being Carrie Bradshaw before there was a Carrie Bradshaw.

My mother instilled in me a belief that I could do and be anything I wanted. She was a trail blazer of a single mom back in the day, and she did whatever she had to do to raise my sister and me. I think it was hard for her when, in one of those instances of missing what you didn’t have, my sister and I became stay-at-home moms. I don’t think it was so much the home baked cookies we missed, but a kind of stability that was often lacking in our young lives.

In any case, when the kids started multiplying, and my husband’s career - which unlike mine was both well-defined and fueled by some serious drive (and relocation packages) – stay-at-home motherhood was a good fit. Early on, I labored under the delusion that it would be easy – how hard could it be with two loving parents and all we needed?

I’ve picked up on a couple of things since then. The truth is, they will fill your heart, and they will break your heart, sometimes simultaneously. The truth is, you will do anything for them…donate blood and body parts (I’m assuming on the body parts), clean up crime scenes, fight someone for the last Cabbage Patch Doll, move mountains of debt…to give them what you think they need. You will learn that you are only as happy as your unhappiest child and that Sr Mary Eleanor was right, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

When you build up a tolerance for your kids, they hit you with grandchildren and trust me, there is not a sweeter high than when one of those little beings, brimming with unconditional love, hits you with an unsolicited, “I love you Grom.”

This really is apropos of nothing, just my existential crisis du jour - brought on by currents of life mixing with waves of sweet nostalgia induced by the approaching holidays.

For decades our family ritual has been to go to Mass on Christmas Eve, followed by Chinese food for dinner. Christmas Day is spent at home, French toast for breakfast and something easy for dinner. This tradition began after our first Christmas in Texas. That Christmas, in the Dark Ages before Amazon Prime, I bought all the gifts, wrapped, packed and shipped them back to my in-laws in New York, so that Santa would be able to find the kids where they woke up on Christmas morning. My husband and I, three kids (1986), and the dog followed the packages days later. The process was reversed to get it all home. And lets not leave out the part where the dog left a package…in my in-laws bedroom. That was the last time he was invited.

The next Christmas we wised up and began Christmasing in place, inaugurating the Christmas Eve Mass and Chinese food ritual that we’ve pretty much followed, with additions and minor deviations, since.

Last night my husband and I were reminiscing about how our rituals took shape and what an amazing run we’ve had.

I’ve always tried to be sanguine about them coming home for Christmas. I remember how hard it was to divide time between our families when we were first married. I’ve always encouraged our kids to do what works best for them and makes them happy, so they can enjoy the holidays guilt free.

My evil plan worked really well.

They’ve kept coming back much longer than I thought they would. There have been a few years when distance, work conflicts and such have prevented us all from being together and I’ve known we have to be prepared for change as the family expands.

This year, as I look forward to them all being here for Christmas, I’m also looking back at the day my husband announced to his parents, over Sunday dinner, that we would be moving to Texas for a career opportunity. I remember how the color drained from my mother-in-law’s face and the food in my own mouth turned to dust as it dawned on me that my mother-in-law, my children’s devoted Baba, the epitome of a kid person, would be watching her three oldest, and geographically closest, grandchildren move halfway across the country.

Right before we left, she gave us a framed piece of calligraphy that reads, “There are two things you give your children: one is roots - the other is wings.”

I have carried that piece with us over 32 years and four states. It resonates with me now, as it did then, as our long run of family Christmases is inevitably transitioning to something new. Our oldest son and his family will be moving overseas in January, taking advantage of a career opportunity for our fabulous daughter-in-law. Our youngest daughter will be getting married in October, building a new family unit and embracing new traditions.

I am experiencing the Christmas season more deeply this year. Reliving Christmases Past as I make my mother’s Springerle and hang beloved ornaments on Christmas Present, our brand-new faux tree. I am deeply grateful for the Then and determined to enjoy every moment of the Now. Thankful for the wise and cherished words from my mother-in-law that informed our parenting; feeling fortunate that our children grew their roots deep and their wings wide.

And I’m so gonna ask Santa for some transatlantic flights.

The Quickest Way to Lose Five Pounds

My mother always said that the quickest way to lose five pounds was to stand up straight. And then she’d bark the familiar directive…“Chin up! Shoulders back! Tummy in! Fanny under!”

Go ahead, try it. It pretty much works. Until you have to breathe, anyway.

The summer has been filled with lots of good times, most involving food and there have been more than a few missed Weight Watchers meetings, so these last days of August have become my ‘salad days’. Not the way Willy Shakespeare meant them, though this time of year often has me reflecting on my younger self.

Twenty-nine years ago today, I graduated from college. Fine, they were probably not my salad days, either. I was older and wiser - having taken thirteen years to accomplish the feat. I really enjoyed my time at the University of Texas. I worked harder and appreciated more than my fresh-out-of-high-school-self had and I was exhilarated to graduate at the tender age of thirty.

There was no Pomp & Circumstance, no grand ceremony for a summer graduation, and just as well, since I spent the day in Labor & Delivery, giving birth to our fourth child.

That’s a long way of saying that my baby is twenty-nine today. My baby.

Coincidentally, I’ve recently been sucked back into the rabbit hole (rabbits like salad) of ancestry.com. My older daughter has been digging around the family tree and discovered that my great grandfather Louis, my Grommie’s dad, was married to two people. At the same time.

The revelation comes at a time when I’ve been wondering how to preserve my mother’s bon mots and witticisms (subjective, I know) for future generations. Catch phrases. Familial expressions and inside jokes. Crap she made up. Her renditions of novelty songs from the ‘40s.

Who will sing ‘Mairzy Doats’ to future generations? I mean, besides me.

More than just preserving, I want to understand the life experiences, the highs and the lows and the history of my mother and my grandmother and those who came before them. I wish they had shared all of it with us before they left. Did my grandmother know about her dad’s first wife and her half-brother? Did the half-brother know about the half-siblings that came after him? None of them could have had a clue that the momentous occasions of their lives - marriages, divorces, births and deaths – would now be readily available on this thing called the Internet.

In the moment, Louis probably felt secure that his family in New Hampshire was under wraps to the family he produced in New York.

Moving back to where we were born and raised has fueled a lot of my current interest in genealogy. Earlier this year, I found myself in a diner next to a table of my father’s relatives – a moment of serendipity that opened the door to wonderful reconnection. Now as I sift through census records and city directories, it’s fascinating to think that my husband’s forebears and mine could have crossed paths on an almost daily basis.

My fascination extends to wondering how those ancestors lived and worked and thought about everything. What were their stories of love, found and lost? Of their heartaches and happiness shared?

If they knew we would have access to the salient points, would they have wanted to expound upon the forces that brought them to those points? Do we want to know from a voyeuristic perspective? Or is it the eternal search for connection, for reassurance and meaning in all of life’s occurrences, epic and mundane?

I’m driven by the need for connection, as well as a desire to be a good steward of our family stories. I don’t want to plaster the world with them Kardashian style, what I’m sure my mother and grandmother would refer to as airing the family laundry, but I do want to preserve and pass on the history because it has value and meaning.

A friend recently asked me what I want my legacy to be. I’d never thought about a legacy before and my initial thought was that if I left the world tomorrow, I’d be pretty okay with how things have gone. I’ve never had a burning desire to hit the record books, but the more I contemplated the question, the more I recognized that I want my children to know me, to know where they came from. Not just the physical DNA, but the cultural DNA, the people, the places, the events that defined the lives of those who came before us, giving direction to our own, and those who come after us, as well.

Until I reconnected with my father’s surviving sister and brother, I didn’t even know how my parents had met. They married young and divorced early, and how they navigated life as divorced people had a profound influence on my sister’s and my experience of the world. Growing up, it fostered a special bond between my sister and I, but the topic of our parents’ experience, and ours by extension, was studiously avoided.

But the stories of our parents and grandparents, spoken and unspoken, guide us as we navigate our own lives. When we share our life experience with our kids, there’s comfort and support in the knowledge that we struggled, as our parents struggled, as their parents struggled, to meet the challenges presented by life – marriage, divorce, family, career, death. We are reassured knowing our parents counted pennies as they grocery shopped together as newlyweds. That they had each other’s back shepherding their kids through adolescence and into adulthood. That they weathered windfalls and shortfalls and got to the other side. That they had high points and low points and somehow got through 100% of their worst days, helps us to know that we can, too.

I can use the Internet to look up things like the origin of salad days and figure out what course I’m on, metaphorically speaking, in the seven course meal of life (it isn’t salad). I’m not swirling the drain, but I’m not getting any younger. So I’ll keep up my search, using social media and historical records to identify and deepen our understanding of our story. When I go, I don’t want to take the family secrets and my mother’s one-liners with me.

That’s what blogs are for.

You know that one about the two best days in a vacation homeowner’s life?

The day you buy it. And the day you sell it.

Our lake song began five years ago this very weekend.

That was the time we borrowed my sister’s place. It was the first time in years that we had all our kids together at the lake. We were awash with familial love and togetherness.

And then I saw the For Sale sign.

Despite his protestations of, “We are not doing this again,” it was mere weeks before my husband found himself covered in mouse poop and acorns as we removed insulation from the ceiling. I say, “We,” because much like Jim and Marlin on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, he wrestles the alligators, mice, squirrels and bats while I chronicle events. She who sits and writes also serves.

This is much on my mind this morning as I grab coffee and walk to the porch for a quick scroll through Instagram before doing my writing exercises ahead of the morning hordes, who will no doubt render my keyboard if not mute, certainly moot.

It never ceases to amaze me, the feelings I have when I see the sun on the lake in the morning. We don’t own a boat and I jump in the lake approximately every third year - I wouldn’t call myself a water person. But there’s something so incredibly Zen about looking out on the water from my perch on this porch…my attitude gets an immediate adjustment.

Interestingly, to me anyway, the porch weighs on me when we’re not here. It’s long and narrow with a low ceiling and it leaks like a sieve. The ceiling has been opened at the far end, revealing stained and rotting rafters, to allow for the free flow of water as roof leaks are tracked and repairs attempted. The leak of long standing necessitated replacing a few floorboards and the floor got a fresh coat of paint. To protect that effort, buckets dot the floor when we’re not in residence. When we’re here, as this morning, they sit stacked in the corner.

Built in the late ‘50’s, the porch is an addition to the front of what started as a one-room cabin. The original windows thus open out onto the porch, cutting into key real estate in the space. After a few bumps and bruises, strategically placed benches directing traffic around the open windows have trained us to maneuver with fewer mishaps. The front side of the porch is lined with sliding windows that, despite the screens we had made for them, require vacuuming bug corpses out of the tracks in order to slide the windows open to the lake air.

At the near end, we have our growing rock collection. Rock painting has become the past time of choice for our grandchildren and the porch is both studio and gallery. I had assumed we’d be releasing rocks back into the wild, but no. The ledge that lines the windows is perfect display space.

Not unlike the Zen I get from the view to the water, I find something restorative about the porch itself, even in its ramshackle state. I think about what we might someday do to this space, an ethereal second or third phase plan, to correct the leaks and improve airflow and overall functionality. Should we find a way to salvage the original structure? Is it wiser and more cost effective to remove and replace it?

This morning as I scroll through Instagram lake house hashtags, the polished perfection of space after space stands out in marked contrast to my little happy place. The grandeur and luxury of some of the homes is stunning. As a designer…as a person with a pulse…I love to pore over these images. But none of them capture the feeling that I had when I walked out onto the porch this morning. None of the images captures what it is I’m looking for.

As I sit on the porch, looking at both the minor imperfections and major flaws, I find myself a little resistant to the ‘remove and replace’ option. It’s not so much about respecting the history or integrity of the original structure – which is something I’m always mindful of in my work, but respecting the history of us, the tapestry of our family. Sure, I’d like not to worry about the rain and ice dams. I’d like the chipmunks not to run show on the patio or in the crawl space; I’d like to leave the windows open without worrying about somebody getting a black eye. But I want to avoid something that looks so new, polished and perfect that it doesn’t represent us.

I love good house porn. I appreciate what goes into styling for a photo shoot and what judicious editing can do. But I’m looking for real life. I’m longing for spaces that are lived in. I wish that I were a photographer with skills sufficient to capture what it is I see, with my eyes and my heart, when I walk out onto the porch.

Truths reveal themselves to me this morning.  Maybe you see what it is you’re looking for. And luxury is where you find it.

Pssst…House Porn.

I might have a problem.

When I was a young woman and could squeeze a few bucks from the grocery budget, I’d pick up the occasional copy of Better Home & Gardens. It didn’t take long to pick up on the fact that not only was a subscription rate way cheaper, but subscribers got their fix days earlier than the poor fools hanging out at the newsstand waiting to pay cover price.

I was hooked.

In the years between then and now, I escalated from the soft stuff, magazines, to the hard cover stuff – coffee table books and compendiums of window treatments. My dependence has resulted in copious amounts of time and money poured into my habit; not to mention missed social obligations from falling down the rabbit holes of Pinterest and Instagram and occasionally forgetting to eat. Okay, well, not that.  But it could have happened. For many of these years, I’ve had a good cover: as a design student, house porn was required reading; as a working designer, it’s called Research and Development.

soft cover stuff

I’ve been reflecting on this because of my growing collection of soft core stuff – those magazines are taking up a fair bit of real estate in my little office. Not quite the stash of my grandfather’s National Geographics, but voluminous nonetheless. Current subscriptions include House Beautiful, This Old House, and Country Living, as well as the previously noted BH&G, (continuous since 1981!). I find this group more relatable, certainly the design more attainable than say, Architectural Digest. It’s a growing collection, because while the idea of leisurely leafing through a magazine is seductive…what is this leisure? The time available to feed my habit is inversely proportional to my stash, making it more prudent to get quick hits on my iPhone and send the magazines straight to the shelf. Kicking the paper habit is hard. What are the chances of getting the publishers to put production on hold while I catch up on the backlog? Right.

So I was contemplating both the recycling bin and cancelling my subscriptions when my deus ex machina arrived in the form of the FedEx guy delivering an advance copy of Sandra Espinet’s new book, Barefoot Luxury.

How to say…SQUIRREL!

The package included a cover letter from Andrew Joseph PR requesting I consider reviewing the book and posting on social media. Crazy. I had literally just listened to Sandra Espinet on an episode of my favorite podcast, LuAnn Nigara’s A Well Designed Business.

Up front, I have to tell you that Espinet is a luxury designer with a capital Luxury. Me? Not so much. I almost passed on this podcast episode precisely because she is so high end. But I’m glad I tuned in, because in the interview, I found her to be engaging and down to earth. I enjoyed listening to her espouse her position on designing from a perspective of what you know and addressing topics I’ve been struggling with internally. Espinet’s thoughtful views and approach to design and business gave me much to think about, and I was excited and flattered to have the opportunity to review her new book.

Honestly, I generally steer clear of the high end market – it isn’t where I come from and, generally speaking, it isn’t what my clients are looking for. Beyond affordability, my first thought tends to be: who’s going to clean that? In our house, it’s me. While my husband might not see it that way, if there’s going to be cleaning done, I’m in charge. So high end design is often off-putting to my practical side. (Yes, honey. I do have one.)

Barefoot Luxury delivers some serious hard cover house porn. Hector Velasco Fazio’s photographs are just what you might expect: breathtaking. They capture the depth of Espinet’s impeccable sense of design, color and context; and the soaring scale of situation and space.  

But I read it for the articles. Really.

The book is over 200 pages, most overflowing with photographs and accompanying descriptors, and just 13 devoted primarily to prose, but those were the pages that captured my interest. Sandra Espinet is an engaging writer, at once hip historian, design docent and intriguing insider. Her words breathe more life into this luxury design travelogue than I would have imagined. I love her background info on tourism in Mexico and the rise of the private communities to which she caters. I appreciate her approach to design which includes a respect for the local community, its artisans and natural resources.

The press packet that accompanied my copy of the book included Espinet’s definition of the concept of barefoot luxury as “the ultimate way of living freely without pretense yet still with elegance and style”. Although I might take issue with the concept of living “without pretense” in one of these Mexican coastline retreats, I can’t argue the “elegance and style”. I think that’s what I liked most about the book – the designs are thoughtful embodiments of what her clients are looking for. They capture how her clients want to feel in their spaces, without trends or gaudy excess. That’s the kind of design I believe you strive for at any price point.

I brought the book with me on a weekend trip to our little camp in the Adirondacks – lightyears from Mexican Resort Living and devoid of pretense. We have our own special style, though we might be light on the elegance. It was interesting to juxtapose Espinet’s elegantly manicured and maintained resort-style retreats with the reality of our fixer upper at the lake. Call me clueless, but it is one of life’s little ironies that our vacation place is exponentially more work than anticipated. Camp maintenance is not unlike my magazine stash: inversely proportional to the leisure to enjoy it. No staff to prep the place for our arrival, no one to set the Adirondack chairs out on the patio. 

But the thing is…there is a patio, no shoes required.

Luxury is where you find it.

Sometimes, once is enough.

Here’s the thing about a high school reunion, one you’re excited about, anyway: you start out all bright-eyed and optimistic to see people you haven’t set eyes on in years. Maybe a little apprehension mixes with anticipation, and a cocktail,  to fuel an initial euphoria of OMG!s and How long has it been?s. After a bit, you start to assess. Maybe you’re feeling good about how you’ve weathered the last several years. Or maybe you’re feeling like you need another cocktail and the name of somebody’s plastics guy. In any case, one thing leads to another and by the end of the night you’re remembering that you didn’t miss high school, after all.

That’s pretty much what happened for me with the Trading Spaces Reunion and Reboot when it aired April 8th.

Interior design had been around for ages before Trading Spaces hit the airwaves, but Trading Spaces was the show that sparked the explosion of DIY, home improvement and interior design programs that have become stalwarts of popular culture. With an unbeatable mix of personality, possibility and train wreck, this show truly engaged the audience.  Love it or hate it, you were invested.

I alternated between loving and hating. The loving part was the voyeur in me, the side that tells my husband to drive slowly at night, so I can look in people’s windows to see what design is, or is not, happening within. The hating part was the trained professional, the side of me that wants to create a space that addresses the client’s wants and needs – not artistic expression or network ratings.

So, yes - it was fabulous to see all of the cool kids; a hoot to relive some of the glory days. And if I were looking for a plastics guy, I would definitely call Laurie Smith.

But once the Trading Spaces Reboot started, I was remembering the bad parts about high school.

If you missed it, or need a refresher, check out this 360 Degree Tour. Wiggle your way through all of the angles.

Now can we talk design?  

I know a lot of designers and I’m fairly certain they all cringe at requests for ‘theme’ rooms. So Doug Wilson’s “Hawaii Ho!” room was off on the wrong flip-flop from the get-go. Doug’s ‘island resort’ approach was to wrap the walls in burlap. Have you ever used burlap? It smells. It can take weeks to air out under the best conditions – forget the Trading Spaces two day window. It will always retain some of that earthy odor and there will always be fibers breaking free. In this tiny room, where they will have to squeeze through to avoid bruising their shins on the bed frame, they will be brushing up against and breathing fibers in,  on the regular.

And what’s up with the lighting in the island resort? Are the solar panels on the ceiling to facilitate filming or simulate tanning on an island beach?

Next door, Hildi Santo-Tomas was unfolding her “Deconstructed Penguin” design. Her inspiration was a beautiful designer silk. Listen, I’ve seen Frozen a few dozen times – I’m hip to the frozen fractal vibe, though one might have expected splashes of red, owing to the ‘deconstructed’ part. I understand that budget and available yardage didn’t allow for use in quantity, but to recreate with paint on walls and ceiling was just looking for trouble. In fairness, in the reveal it can be interpreted as a softened watercolor effect of the fabric. If you squint. But sometimes too much of a good thing is really just too much. The small room is chaotic with pattern, leaving no place for your eye to rest. Why not just one wall? It would have been more reasonably managed in the tight time frame, with better results.

As it happens, painting on almost any design show is a major issue for me. Painting skills, or lack thereof, offend my sensibilities to a degree that renders me almost speechless. Almost.

There’s a commonly held belief that anybody can paint. There’s no barrier to entry – you buy brushes, paint, and bada bing bada boom, you’re Picasso. Sure, anybody can do it. But precious few people do it well. This episode of Trading Spaces underscores that point. I wasn’t on board with Doug’s design decision to paint the ceiling brown in the island room, but the worst part about it was the application. The bad cut-in job doesn’t suggest “designer”, it screams amateur! Time, attention to detail, and a roll of painters’ tape could have avoided that outcome.

The fractal effect in Hildi’s room was accomplished with foam brushes and little precision. You can see in the close-ups of the work, that the paint is laid on in multiple directions and thicknesses. Unless someone takes the time to thoroughly sand it all smooth, that will adversely affect every subsequent coat of paint.

And it wasn’t just walls and ceilings, but the painted finishes on built-ins, as well. The Murphy bed in the Penguin room, for instance. An ingenious idea, but how well it was constructed is anybody’s guess. Based on the quality of the paint job, it was another project with DIY written all over it. In crayon. 

DIY is awesome, unless it’s poorly executed. And then it’s beyond sad. If the design quality and execution of Trading Spaces rooms is not comparable to the rest of the house, the cost of this 15 minutes of fame extends far beyond the redesign budget. $2000 poorly allocated now, can cost thousands more in extra work or be lost in resale value.

Many of the shortcomings of the work are due to the artificial and arbitrary time lines imposed by the format. I know tight schedules are mechanisms for invoking drama and tension, but they ring false, like the scripted exchanges between designers and carpenters fighting about access and deadlines. What it means for the finished product is truly sad for the homeowners.

Ultimately, the fact that the homeowners have no voice in what happens in their own homes is a huge turn off for me. I know it fuels the tension – that possibility of a train wreck we can’t look away from – but it runs counter to how I, and every designer I know, works with clients. It’s one of homeowners’ biggest fears when considering hiring a designer: they’re afraid that they won’t be listened to. How unfortunate if the reboot of the show perpetuates that fear.

I loved the reunion. As for the reboot…sometimes, once is more than enough.

Root words and recipes.

Roots have been top of mind lately. Quite literally, since I was overdue for a salon appointment. Guess that kills the does she or doesn’t she mystery.

But, roots. Putting them down. Rediscovering them. Covering them up. Rooting for your team (Go Pats!) Rooting around for blog ideas.

I whined about a topic in a blog group the other day. I asked for someone to give me an idea. Pleeeease. My design friend, Darla of Darla Powell Interiors responded first. She said, “Rutabagas. Go!”

You know, a smarter person might’ve chuckled and said, “No, really.”

But…hello. Root vegetable?!

Kismet, meet my friend Wikipedia.

Turns out, a rutabaga is not just a big ass turnip. It’s actually the love child of some ancient turnips and cabbages. Not exactly a plus in the PR column, but further reading reveals that they’re really good for you, in a low carb-antioxidant-nutrient-dense-cruciferous vegetable sort of way. Well, so what? How do they taste?

I bought a rutabaga.

I googled. I was not prepared for the plethora of five star recipes found on multiple food and cooking sites. I assumed directions for a simple mash, but found recipes for everything from rutabaga cheddar soup to rutabaga spice cake, many vegan and gluten free. Rutabagas can be boiled, sautéed, roasted, fried…did somebody say ‘au gratin’?! I like this article from Rodale Press that includes prep tips and several purportedly healthy recipes. Despite the copious amounts of butter and cheese, not to mention rutabaga, involved I’m going to try one.

I’m less than enthusiastic about heading out for additional ingredients, so I narrow down the recipe field based on what’s readily available in my kitchen. It should come as no surprise that my enthusiasm for executing a rutabaga recipe is inversely proportional to the amount of work it will require. From the recipes in this particular article, factoring in the time of day, ingredients on hand, expertise and labor required, as well as the death row mentality of going to my first Weight Watchers meeting in 35 years tomorrow morning, I opt for the Rutabaga Spice Cake.

She’s a looker, isn’t she?

Two-point-two-four pounds of antioxidant powerhouse, about to go under the knife. As per the instructions I’ve read, I lop off the top and bottom, and yes, this little Brassica napobrassica is a waxed and slippery thing, but a standard vegetable peeler made for a quick, easy peel. I quickly learned that 2.24 pounds is about two pounds more than you need for the cup of freshly grated rutabaga the recipe requires. So I use a heaping packed cup for the cake and dice up a portion of the remaining rutabaga to boil for a quick snack of smashed ‘baga.

While peeling and grating, I’m acutely aware of the rutabaga’s familial relationship with cabbage and broccoli. It has a distinct smell. It doesn’t seem overpowering at the start, but definitely there. In an unusual cake-baking twist, I have zero desire to test the batter while mixing. Zee. Roh. However, as I’m transferring batter from bowl to pan, I get some on my finger and reflexively lick it off and…hey. Sam I Am, maybe I do like green eggs and rutabaga. Interesting. I pop Ruta-cake in the oven and as she bakes, I no longer regret the battle scars from grating two teaspoons of nutmeg – the ‘spice’ in the Rutabaga Spice Cake - because it’s beginning to smell borderline heavenly. It’s close to bedtime when the cake is finished baking, so I just let it cool before covering loosely. I’ll leave frosting for morning.  

In the morning, Jack asks about the cake and, much to his mother’s chagrin (grandparenthood has its perqs), I tell him he can have a piece for breakfast - after it’s frosted and photographed. In all honesty, I have little hope for this cake. My kitchen smells like left over broccoli. Not good. I don’t know if I can bring myself to waste the additional ingredients to bring this cake to completion. I compromise on the frosting investment by cutting the recipe in half. Brown Butter Frosting is a new concept for me - you cook the butter until it turns brown and smells nutty. This appears to add insult to injury and is wrong on too many levels to count, but I follow the steps. In an act of unparalleled cowardice, I offer Jack the frosting spatula. He demurs at first, but I repeat the word ‘frosting’ and he has a change of heart. He tastes…says he doesn’t care for it…then comes back for more. Okay. Maybe there’s something to this.

Jack gets his breakfast cake and eats the whole piece. Not just the frosting. Hey buddy, should we put a piece in your lunch box? Look at me, using my four year old grandson as a garbage disposal for the cake I can’t bring myself to taste. If it’s going to end up in the trash, why not get a few more phytochemicals in him first? My husband has a sliver. He says it’s good…different, but good. He has another sliver.

I will have to try it, but ever since the first mention of rutabaga, I’ve been hearing an earworm. There’s a Blake Shelton song with a line in the chorus that goes, ‘Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit’. It was an easy morph to rutabaga, rutabaga, rutabaga…spit. And it might actually happen after I taste some of this here ‘baga cake.

The clock is ticking…I take a small piece. It does not taste like broccoli. And the frosting is really kind of yummy. I take another small piece. I think about what I could do next time. Wait. What?  I notice the left-over-broccoli smell has dissipated as I help myself to another slice. It’s really pretty good. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.

I’ve waited thirty five years to go to a WW meeting and life is uncertain. I think I’ll eat dessert first.

Is it true?

Did you hear that the gallery wall is dead?

Me, either.

Not exactly. Just some internet grumbling. Stale. Overexposed. That sort of thing. If it is under assault, I can’t sit still for it. I will single-handedly fight to keep it alive. I could do that in the #newoldhouse, just with covering up the WPFH. We’re like the Louvre on Marion, we’ve got so many galleries. And y’all know there’s gonna be a gallery of sorts in The Office - that magical space that time forgot, though I don’t suppose you’ll believe that ‘til you see it.

Check Pinterest and you’ll know for sure that the gallery wall is alive even if, in some cases, we might wish otherwise.  I don’t think that’s because the concept is stale or overexposed, as much as it is overwrought. It’s a case of taking a classic method for displaying art and making it uber trendy. Now it’s like the word uber…you can’t spit without hitting somebody who’s saying ‘uber’ while demonstrating how to make a gallery wall.

People did as people do, they got carried away and started hanging all sorts of crazy ish on walls - without regard to scale, proportion or context. Start with context. If you just want to fill a wall with stuff because all the cool kids are doing it, you’ll probably end up with a less than artful installation. You have to give thought to the why, then the what and the where and the how.

Case in point: a gallery wall I did for a client a while back. There are lots of styles for gallery walls, I chose this project because it’s a super-easy-paint-by-numbers example. Also, I had some pictures of the process. It was completed over five years ago, and I think it holds up pretty well over time.

Here’s my step by step process:

1) Find a client. Be your own client, if you must. In this case, I had a wonderful client I’d worked with previously and bonus - she had a room in dire need of intervention.

2) Be the wall, Danny. Be the wall. The client didn’t plan to stay in the house long term, so the plan was mostly cosmetic – make it happily livable, and set the stage for potential buyers a few years hence. I gave her a detailed design plan to implement (undoing some unfortunate design choices, upgrading lighting, replacing counters and cabinet hardware, painting, and so on). When the messy stuff was out of the way, I scaled the wall.

3) Spend a fair amount of time considering what to do with your new blank canvas. If you’re staging to sell, you might pick up something large scale and colorful at Pier 1 or HomeGoods. For a more personal statement, you could format and apply a meaningful quote with vinyl lettering. Or ding ding ding: gallery wall! As it happened, while the work was being done on the shell of my client’s kitchen, I was experimenting with kitchen photography. I suggested a gallery wall, using some of those photographs, framing them with Wood Gallery Frames from Pottery Barn. These are my Go To: nice quality, inexpensive (as compared to custom framing), readily available in multiple sizes and finishes, with free shipping. Can’t beat a classic. It’s also super easy to change the mood of the room by swapping out photos or whatever you’re displaying – art, fabric swatches – you’re limited only by your imagination. (Note: uniform frames are called for in this application - where consistency and alignment are part of the overall aesthetic. You can mix and match if you’re going free form.) I mocked up a couple of gallery plans on the computer, but…

4)      …if you’re trying this at home, your first pass should be making an arrangement in some open floor space. Use a white sheet or drop cloth to provide a neutral background for your art pieces. This will give you a better sense of what works together, both for color and scale.

5)      In this space, having made the decision for precision, I mapped the area the collection would cover, arranging and aligning within a defined space, keying it with frame and photo sizes. You have some wiggle room in a free form gallery, but when you go with a tightly aligned arrangement, precision is key. The center or focal point of your collection (or a single piece of art) should generally be at eye level. In a dining space, because you’ll mostly be sitting to view, adjust it a bit lower. Keep in mind that ‘eye level’ in art gallery-ese, is 57” from the floor.

6)      Make patterns. What? Make Patterns. Do not skip the patterns.  I’m talking to you. If your wall surface is out of the ordinary, like a brick wall, you have to be extra diligent with arrangement: make sure hanging points fall within mortar joints. Or cross your fingers and hope brick clips will work with your bricks. We’ll be testing brick clips in the Lab next week.

7)      Stand back and admire your work.

Whether you need to fill a vast expanse on a less than vast budget or you have a treasured collection you want to display, thoughtful curation and ruthless editing are the way to achieve a gallery wall worthy of the name.

Yes sir, as long as this girl is in the business of rearranging other people’s stuff, gallery walls gonna survive the haters.

Vive le gallery wall!

Legacy

A random comment about blogging yesterday morning led to an inquiry about my office progress, which led me to look up from my desk to survey the situation in my corner of the world. Acknowledging a closer resemblance to the tortoise than the hare in the Race to My Office, I thought a progress post, in the Keeping It Real genre, might be in order. I spotted the clock. “Hey! It’s only 7:20?!  I have some time to write, right now!”

Um. What’s that battery for?

Oh. That’s the battery that fell out of the clock when I kicked it over while working on the install of the last rod. At, as you can see, 7:20 the night before.

Escaped my notice, because if a girl has installed rods, 

…she just wants to hang curtains.

And when she hangs the curtains, she’ll see that they’re too long.

These would be the 63” panels.

To the naked eye, you’re thinking maybe she should have gone with, oh…perhaps…62.5” panels? Yeah. They don’t make them. And the truth is, the panels labelled ’63 inches’ actually range in size from 63.5 to 64.5 inches. I knew that going in, because having done this a time or two, I assumed some variance and did a quick check beforehand.  In a perfect world, they would all be 63” long, they would fit perfectly in the space allotted to them by hanging the rod as high as the crown molding will allow. And they would not have become blog fodder. Yet, here we are.

The adjustments I had hoped would be minor and accomplished by fiddling with the ring clips, are calling for a different solution. Such is the nature of inexpensive panels purchased on a super Cyber Monday sale. In 2016. Returns are not an option. If the panels are to be hung without digging out the sewing machine and taking up 576 inches of hem, options must be explored.

And that’s how I found myself in the basement, foraging for drapery hooks in the bags and boxes of tricks still waiting to be unpacked. Nary a hook to be found, but hey! Look at this!

A refresher course in Irony: 

Having come up short in the drapery hook department, our girl determines that a trip to the fabric store cannot possibly be squeezed in within the next day or two. It would take at least an hour. Assuming focus could be maintained. In a fabric store. Right. So, drapery hooks are added to an amazon order and we’ll wait to do the fine tuning until the glass tops are installed on the counter, at which point we will know, without question, what the required adjustments should be. Moving right along…

Wait! Did you see that ornament kit?!

This kit has existed in its half completed state for more than twenty five years. My mother was pretty famous for starting needlework projects. When she moved on from this mortal plane twenty five years ago, we went through her things and found more than a few of them. Since I have four kids, I took this one, planning to finish the ornaments as a loving legacy for my children from their grandmother. That was the plan.

My mom had finished the Cowardly Lion, so he made it to the big ornament box. He graces our tree every year. I thought the Tin Man was waiting for his loop, but after careful scrutiny, see a finished ornament. Alas, the Scarecrow and Dorothy haven’t even been cut out. I don’t know when exactly my mother started the kit, but as noted, I’ve been sitting on it for twenty five years. It brings back happy memories of my mom and how she’d swear a blue streak when her French knots got knotted. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s my visit from Christmas Past. Christmas is, by all accounts, right around the corner.

Do you see what I did there? I spent two hours examining and waxing poetic about an unfinished needlework kit, when I could have been, I don’t know…taking a trip to the store for drapery hooks?

The Wallpaper From Hell and other office gossip.

I don’t know how it works at your house, but around here if there’s an aspect of design that offends my sensibilities, I’ve been known to resort to vandalism. So, if the color of the family room offends me, I might splash a few paint samples on the wall. I’m not discreet about it - focal wall, about eye level is good. You can really move a project up the food chain that way. Don’t like the wallpaper? Start stripping it in a very conspicuous place. Oh. Bummer, honey. No way we can salvage that paper.

While the technique has worked for me in the past, I’m a little off my game. It’s unfortunate that the sick peach undertones of the wallpaper haven’t grown on me in the past year, because while I was able to get it on the Hit List, I was also assigned to get it off the wall. Let me tell you, this stuff was applied with perpetuity in mind. This is what I’ve accomplished in the past year…

There’s about a million square feet of this stuff and since chewing it off an inch at a time is not my idea of a good time, I opted for a cover up - covering as much wallpaper as possible with every photograph and piece of art we own.

Not a long term strategy, but enough of a diversion that I was able to start another project, my office, which is also unfinished. 

But the skeletons have come home to roost in the closet next to my office.

And though I can live a while longer with the wallpaper from hell in a state of suspended animation, my office situation has become untenable. It’s been waiting to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted for several months, and in that time has become a wasteland of stuff I can’t put away because, keep up! -  the room needs to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted. The skeletons have me thinking maybe I can tap into the Closet Mojo. 

Since the Closet Exposé, harmony and balance are almost as easy to find as my clothes. Could an Office Exposé - metaphorical paint swatches on a wall - bring similar results to my office space? I’m a little afraid that pictures of my office in its current state could go viral. In the design world, you don’t want to be famous for ‘Before’ photos, but if I hafta throw down to represent, I’m willing to be the lab rat of design research. 

The following images are graphic and disturbing. How does she live like that?!  How can she find anything?! That, my friends, is what I’m sayin’. 

This is the here, this is the now.

Game on. Watch this space.