vintage — Page 6

Playing House

July 30, 2019 at 9:46 am by Claudia

I’d been thinking about doing something with the antique dollhouse for about a week. Yesterday, I pulled it down from its perch on top of the china cabinet in the den and moved it to the kitchen table.

I ran up and down the stairs several times, gathering up whatever I had on hand in my stash. That isn’t a whole lot, by the way, because 1) dollhouse furniture can be expensive and 2) I don’t have much storage space.

This little lovingly handmade house has one big room and two tiny rooms. Getting to one of the rooms is almost impossible (but I’ll do it at some point). All the interior walls are made of dark wood. So, it can get really dark in there.

I had an idea to find something I could use as wallpaper on the living room wall that faces me when I look inside the house. But I would only attach it temporarily, as I have qualms about doing anything permanent to the walls. It is, after all, a piece of folk art as well.

Here’s what I came up with:

I purchased the chair and the sofa a while back. The vase was in my stash. Barbara gave me the console table. She might have given me the rugs, as well, but I’m not sure about that.

The wallpaper was a duplicate of some I have on hand for a future project. I forgot I had it in my stash, so that was a wonderful surprise!

The pitcher was a gift from Barbara and the painting was something I received in a swap.

I look forward to getting books for the shelves as well as tchotchkes.

The hooks were in Hummingbird Cottage but they kept falling off the wall. I decided to use them here.

See that room to the left? The only way to get in there is via the doorway and a door that opens into the room from the other even smaller room. I’m planning on that being the bedroom, so I’ll have to find a bed that I can maneuver into the room from the doorway. Yikes.

That other, really tiny room will be a kitchenette. It’s almost all doors and windows, so again – yikes. There’s no room for a bathroom.

My take on this little antique house is that it’s a family getaway – a cottage or a cabin – that’s been in that family for years. Rustic elegance. Smallish kitchen, just enough to refrigerate a few items and/or boil some water. One bedroom. (Maybe the bathroom is in some unseen outbuilding?)

It was awfully fun playing house and I look forward to adding more.

(The server that this blog is on is a wee bit slow this morning – at least for me. If it’s slow for you, hang in there. It will be fixed.)

Happy Tuesday.

Chair Exchange

June 9, 2019 at 9:48 am by Claudia

The catmint is going strong with beautiful purple/lavender flowers. I have a lot of it in the big garden bed. It blooms from mid-spring to early summer. It’s usually full of the sound of buzzing bees.

My other spirea is now filling up with these beautiful pink blooms. It lives at the far end of the porch and shares that space with the Annabelle hydrangea. Both bushes, which I should have planted much further apart, are huge.

A gorgeous day yesterday and another one today. I did some weeding, and watering – outdoor and indoor plants – washed the sheets, vacuumed – that sort of thing. Today, Don is off to work at the Farmer’s Market. It’s been very slow, portrait-wise, for the past two days, so let’s hope today is more productive for him.

A couple of weeks ago, in anticipation of the sofa arrival, Don and I switched out some tables. Then, after seeing a photo of these chairs in my former apartment in Cambridge, he brought up the idea of using them in place of the four mismatched chairs we’d been using. I’ve been pushing for them to make an appearance in the kitchen for years, but he wasn’t interested before. This was good news!

We wanted cleaner lines in the kitchen. There’s a lot going on in there and we wanted to eliminate too much busy-ness. So, Don exchanged the four chairs for these two, which were living in our storage space.

You can’t tell from this photo, but they’re really beautiful. The wood is highly polished mahogany. I found them in a tiny little used furniture shop in Cambridge, MA, over 30 years ago. They used to be in the offices of Mass Mutual, an insurance company, and they have the metal tag on the back to prove it. I used them in my little dining area in the Cambridge kitchen.

Taking a picture of an old, darkish, snapshot is never easy!

I’ll try to get a good shot of one of the chairs today, so you can see the beautiful finish. When Don brought them back to the house, I spent the better part of an afternoon cleaning them. It’s so good to have them back! Since there’s rarely anyone but the two of us here, why not use them? And they’re incredibly comfortable. Since I will no longer let Don eat while sitting on the new sofa, we’re actually sitting at the table more often. The chairs, with a nice wide seat, are perfect for a big guy like Don. They’re substantial.

I was sitting in one of those chairs when my friend and colleague at Boston University, Annette, ran downstairs to comfort me when I told her that my brother had just died. Annette died last year – far too soon.

There are memories, both good and poignant, in those chairs.

Okay. We both woke up way too early today. Let’s just say it was before 5 am. I’m going to try to stay in the moment until I can sneak a nap in later in the day.

Happy Sunday.

Natural Beauty

June 8, 2019 at 9:59 am by Claudia

I have to tell you, this time of year – early June – is maybe the most spectacular on the property. It’s not that the garden beds are full of flowers, they’re not. No, it’s because wild phlox and fleabane and yarrow and, most of all, the wild roses are blooming everywhere.

I had nothing to do with any of it. It’s all nature’s handiwork.

This year, especially, the wild roses are outdoing themselves. Lots of rain, though a pain in the tush, does have its plusses. The lushness of all the wildflowers is one of them. When I decided to do something with the area behind the kitchen, a little valley that had been ignored by us for years, it started to have a purpose.

First, I added some stepping stones up to the back forty – that was about 4 or 5 years ago. When Don was out in La Jolla a few years ago, I started hauling cinder blocks that had been stashed in the woods by a previous owner to the secret garden. One by one, because they’re heavy! I simply wanted to start to define what was an overgrown area, to separate and stop the wild growth from sneaking onto the grass. When I ran out of cinder blocks, I bought some pavers to bring control to another part of the garden. I cleared a path to the crabapple tree that had been previously been hidden from view. When Don came back home later in the summer, he added pavers to make a path from the opening just outside the kitchen door to the soon-to-be-installed propane tank, allowing easier access to our propane guys. And, they looked pretty, giving further definition to what was becoming a specific green space.

Then, last year, I found the four large, vintage pots – two from England, two from France. I planted them with coleus and vines and little white flowers, set them on the cinder blocks, and suddenly there was my low-cost version of a balustrade topped by decorative pots. They made a huge difference.

Then came the addition of some vintage garden furniture.

That’s it.

The rest I can’t take credit for. I’m always thankful for that little space, but never as much as I am right now, with wild roses blooming everywhere, little pops of Dame’s Rocket (wild phlox,) and fleabane scattered here and there.

Yesterday, I grabbed the weed whacker and cleaned up the path to the back lawn and nailed a lot of poison ivy and weeds. Don mowed.

It looks so darned pretty back there!

I’m hoping some of the other peonies start to open today. One of the buds is just about there. And then, we’ll look forward to thousands of fragrant white blooms on the catalpa. This progression is so familiar to us now, after having lived here for nearly 14 years.

Grateful.

Happy Saturday.

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Playing House

Chair Exchange

Natural Beauty

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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