The Wedding Planners: It's Like Starting Over All Over Again

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

It's Like Starting Over All Over Again

DH and I bought a new house last week, which will make for our first big move in 11 years. We're not moving far--just about 10 minutes away from where we live now--but we are making a big change.

The house we bought is currently an empty palatte. It's all white inside. White paint, white floors, white tile, white cabinets. We looked at that and thought "cool," we can give it our own stamp.

Uh-huh. Easier said than done.

We started with the furniture. We've been married nearly two decades, and still had a lot of Early Marriage Furniture. You know the kind--the stuff donated by well-meaning relatives, or the stuff you find at garage sales or on the side of the road (that is where my dining room "hutch," really an overgrown bookcase, came from). We wanted stuff that matched. That was meant for the room it went in, i.e., a real hutch ;-)

Furniture took us through a lot of uh...heated discussions. Yeah, they were discussions. Ahem. Really. We survived enough to choose appliances. Then we moved on to paint.

Don't get me started on THAT. Took us nearly two weeks to decide on paint, and we finally nailed down all but one color last night -- when the painter arrived to pick up our final choices because he's starting today. Between him and the interior decorator/flooring designer we had called, we had enough people (think mediators ;-) to make decisions.

It's kind of like when we first got married and had to merge our two highly divergent personalities and tastes in one tiny apartment. It took us weeks to make decisions on everything, and we ended up painting over a few rooms because our compromises turned out to be awful decisions, LOL. We lived and learned, and eventually settled on beige the longer we stayed together (the true compromise ;-). But now we want something vibrant, some real color to go with all those windows and height, and so we had to start at Ground Zero, merging two different views to find a compromise.

So, by next Friday we should have replaced the white with color--a bold step, for beige people--and then be living in our new house a few days after that.

And I'm sure we'll never have another uh...discussion about decorating again ;-)

Shirley

5 Comments:

Brandy said...: Hubs and I have had many discussions (actual discussions) on color for our walls. Our house was brand new and a blank canvas when we moved in. It took 4 years until we found a color for the downstairs bathroom that we liked! *G* Good luck!; January 28, 2009 at 1:42 PM
Shirley said...: LOL. I don't think I have the patience for four years! I truly hope these colors work out. I tried all of them but one on the walls before the painters arrived.

It's a lot to decide...so many walls, and so many colors. We're leaving the basement alone for probably a year, just so we can see how this all works out.; January 28, 2009 at 2:48 PM
Brandy said...: Oh, we didn't wait four years to paint it. We went through, hhmmmm, lets see, (yellow, gray blue, sea blue, and now a nice neutral kahki) four colors before we found one that didn't make us cringe. Of course we changed the lighting in there and the mirror, so that had a LOT to do with the changing colors. *G*; January 29, 2009 at 3:39 PM
Shirley said...: Wow, that is a lot of colors! I have neutrals all over my other house--the one that's going up for sale, soon as we're moved into the new one!

The office is painted and it looks DIVINE. The master bath is done, and the Ligonier Tan was an awesome choice. I'll post before and after photos on my blog when I get over to the house to take pics. I'm trying to stay out of the way of the painters :-)

BTW--it's taking forever to get done because nearly every room was wallpapered, so that made for lots of fun (not) for the painters before they could get one ounce of paint on the walls.

Shirley; February 2, 2009 at 6:41 AM
Linda Goodnight said...: Absolutely gorgeous, Shirley. You should post a pic of your office space--a real writers' paradise.; February 3, 2009 at 8:24 AM