Two and a half years ago when we bought our sublime little cottage (okay, it’s actually a hybrid of a condo and a townhouse but a girl can dream, right?) I experienced some real panic. Not only is 1,000 sq ft not a lot of space for 5 people but it was 300 sq ft less than we already had (which was 200 sq ft less than we had before that and a whole basement less than we had before that). What’s a girl to do?
Clearly, some downsizing was in order but I was loathe to do away with a single one of my pretties. Hadn’t I already left so many beauties behind? And, by the way, aren’t your living spaces supposed to get bigger as you get older and get more kids? I mean, really! I was feeling cheated but I was darned if I was going to be defeated. I fell to thinking about ways that I could keep everything I wanted without having to keep it in boxes on the living room floor. In fact, it became rather a fun challenge to find ways to make it all fit without looking too cluttered or just plain slovenly.
In the end, I found that I could part with a few things without it hurting too much (in some cases, not at all, particularly when it was something belonging to my husband or children) while finding solutions for the rest. Here are just a few ideas I came up with (it wasn’t hard—anyone could think of these things, still, pictures help).
As they say, necessity is the mother of invention and I really needed to invent a way to make this ugly black TV set work in my living room. How does one get away with the illusion that your home is not just old but vintage, a place from the past, when there is this obnoxious indisputable undeniable evidence of the 21st century? This piece of mischief had been in the master bedroom of our old home which wasn’t ideal but better than not having a TV at all (our old one died and my husband bought this after the death of his mother with life insurance money. He gave me half, the jewel, to spend any way I wished so how could I say no?). However, the new master bedroom would be too small for a TV like this, besides which, we were getting pretty tired of watching Spongebob. In bed. With the kids. What’s more (and there is always more!) I wanted a fireplace, something with which I had been spoiled at each of our last four homes. It wasn’t about the fire, it was about the mantle, home to any number of pretties which would have to be jettisoned if no mantle could be procured. This was getting to be a real dilemma.
The solution to this problem was easier for me than it would have been for some as I already had the wonderful antique headboard that makes up most of my “fireplace” surround. It was once brown and attached to a bed in the Breckenridge Hotel which I am pretty sure no longer exists but could be found, once upon a time, in the town of the same name in Colorado. For years I had been using this headboard (which I found in a thrift store nowhere near Breckenridge) to hide the ugly red brick or brown brick or whatever color brick came with the fireplace in my home for the last 10 years. I had long been toying with the idea of painting it but was chicken. What if it was a mistake? Having helped (i.e. pressed into service) my mother strip paint off of more than one chair during the course of my childhood, I shied away from ever having to do such a thing again. Now, I eagerly slapped paint on it so that it would match the mantle that my very clever and talented brother-in-law, John, (as opposed to all the other clever brothers-in-law of which I am possessed) made for me out of trim molding (trim molding!) from the measurements I gave him over the phone. (My measurements! Over the phone! I am still in awe of his great talent.)
Now, when people come to visit, if it is winter and the DVD of happily roaring fires is playing, people actually think for a moment or two that it could look like a real fireplace if caught from the corner of the eye or just in passing or if they had left their glasses behind or some such thing. With that I am content.
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