All Good Things Take Time
A full life takes a long time to cultivate and often requires making a lot of mistakes along the way. What seems like a great opportunity may turn out to be a flop, whereas something you think you’re only settling for may turn out to be a diamond in the rough if you give it a chance and put a little work into it. You have to be willing to take a few risks if you want to get great results. It’s crucial to receive with gratitude and let go when the time comes. And it isn’t over until you leave it.
In the same way, a creating beautiful home is a process. When we fist viewed Serenity, the breakfast nook looked like this. Somehow, I didn’t manage to get any pictures of it from a direct angle before I started working on it.
I fell in love with that ceiling. And that view! Not to mention I had dreamed of having a house with a bay window since I was 10 years old (Serenity has 2!). Within the first month of moving in, I added curtains to the window area because my Bear is incredibly security conscious (it’s a good thing one of us is!) and the wide open windows wigged him out. The curtains are made out of table cloths that I saw at Walmart and thought, “I have to have that fabric on my windows!!” The yellow actually looked great with those curtains which was a happy coincidence because I didn’t get around to painting the walls until three months later. I even chose the paint color (Tahitian Sky by Behr) because it played so well with the curtains. Nerdy side note: in keeping with the love-of-all-things-Joss-Whedon theme of our house, the name has a nice tie in to T.A.H.I.T.I. in “Agents of Shield.” I was ridiculously excited when I made that connection.
Once the walls were painted, I tackled the ceiling and hutch because, blue and orange being complimentary colors, the woodwork was an almost blindingly bright orange. And finally, my brother-in-law helped me install a light fixture to replace the octo-light. I’m sure it was a stunning piece that the former owner was thrilled to have in her home. It’s just not my speed. Incidentally, the new light fixture is from Home Depot’s Eden Collection. We put an offer in on my dream house over 8 years ago (which fell through) and all of the light fixtures were part of that collection, so I was beside myself when I found that one on clearance. My mother-in-law gave us the dining set when we moved into our first house and it served us well for 7 1/2 years.
Eventually, we outgrew a table for 4 – that breakfast nook is the perfect place to host tea parties (albeit big girl tea parties that involve wine as well as tea) and it was a bit cramped. So I prowled OfferUp and Craigslist for weeks looking for a rectangular table, preferably with a bench, and finally found exactly what I was looking for. It came with a bench and two chairs that serendipitously matched some chairs we got with wedding cash after moving in to our first apartment. Unfortunately, they were also the spindly backed kind with a blond oak finish. I was sooooo not excited about refinishing all of those spindles, but I had to do it in order to live with it until I found some really great chairs. I didn’t take a picture before I started working on the set, but here it is after I finished the painting part of the process.
Once I stained the seats of the chairs and the top of the table and bench, it definitely worked as an interim solution, even if it didn’t completely match the vision in my head for the perfect breakfast nook. What happened to the cute starter set? We joyfully released it to a cute young couple looking for a small table to refinish.
After another month of chair hunting, I found the perfect chairs. $50 for all 4 on OfferUp.
I drove 30 miles to get them and to my dismay, discovered that they felt and looked like super fancy molded resin or something – I couldn’t figure out what it was, it just didn’t feel or look like wood up close. But, I hate backing out of buying something, especially after taking the time to drive so far to get them. I figured that oil based primer and gel stain should stick to whatever those things were made of, so I loaded them in my truck and headed home. No joke, several friends inspected them and thought they were plastic, too! Once I got to sanding them however – oh, happy day! – they turned out to be wood after all. Now they add the subtly sculptural element to the space that I was hoping for. This was the first time I worked with gel stain and I loved it! It’s almost impossible to mess up and it sticks like crazy. When I finished these new chairs, I posted the spindly ones on Facebook marketplace and they were gone in about 5 hours.
So give yourself the freedom to take some time when you’re putting together a room and be open to going through several iterations. If it’s not exactly what you envisioned, that’s ok – you’ll be closer to what you want than when you started. Even if the only thing you gain is the chance to work with a new material or try a new technique, you’ll be one step closer to the full life we’re all trying to find.