I'd Never Hire an Interior Decorator...

I know plenty of people long to hire interior decorators, but for what it's worth, this is something I'd never do. I did hire an architect who spent a fair amount of time walking around in my house after the fire, after which he drew up plans with suggestions, almost all of them excellent and quite affordable, regarding improvements I might make when reconstruction began, but that's different, to me, from hiring someone to advise me on what color to paint, or how to decorate, a room. Those decisions are personal, and I'm sufficiently independent and confident in my own judgments that I'd never trust anyone else to make them for me. When I'm not sure about colors, I bring home reams of paint swatches and tape them to the walls in the room I'm planning to paint, and then I check them out in various light. Next, I narrow down my choices and buy a few pints of paint, and then I paint patches, approximately 4 feet square, which I may look at for up to a week before I make my final selection, with which I'm inevitably pleased, which is more than I can say for many people who trust interior decorators to determine what they'd like.

Years ago, I attended a housewarming where I knew hardly anyone, so I did what I tend to do in those circumstances: I headed for the bookcases to see what this guy read. But I was immediately puzzled, because I couldn't figure out his filing system. Philosophy was next to fiction; poetry was next to home improvement, etc.

"What's up with your books?" I asked him, as I sipped an excellent gin and tonic.

His face darkened ominously and he looked at his younger brother, expectantly.

"Uh, I recommended an interior decorator..." the younger brother began, "and she arranged the books on the bookshelves..."

"By SIZE and COLOR!" his older brother finished the sentence, furiously.

Ah yes. That would be a problem for those of us who read. Another reason I grow quiet when the topic of interior decorators comes up is because for some reason, the topic always takes me back to a weekend when I was a bride, when the ex and I had been invited to a fabulous private club in UP Michigan, The Huron Mountain Club, where the ex's cousin had a cabin (technically, it was, indeed, a cabin, but one that Ralph Lauren would have killed for) on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Huron Mountain Club is incredibly beautiful and wild and remote and, in those days, we were out of range of television, phones and radio...there was just the scent of pines, the cool, crisp, sunny air, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore at night...my idea of a perfect vacation...until the afternoon the 2 other women in our group began talking about what tennis camps they'd attended as teenagers. Give me a break! Tennis camps?!?!?!? Really?!?!?!? Puh-leez! I never attended any frigging tennis camps, I muttered to myself, feeling all Holden Caulfieldish as I kicked dusty leaves with my Bass Weejuns, suddenly realizing that although I was at this fabulous place with everyone else, I was really there with my nose pressed up against the glass, as it were...

Sometimes, the stories you hear when people start talking about hiring interior decorators are hilarious. A friend told me that one of his friends, whom I happen to know is close to my age (I'm 61) has a Donald Duck theme in her house, a statement that, by itself, came dangerously close to making me laugh so hard I snorted, something I attempted to camouflage with a prolonged coughing fit, as I listened to his oh-so-serious account of her experience working with a decorator. He said that Ms. Donald Duck had hired a decorator who successfully integrated the Donald Duck theme throughout her house, by doing things like painting the legs on chests of drawers chrome yellow (like duck feet), yada yada yada. The interior decorator probably laughed all the way to the bank.

The reason I've been thinking about this at all is that there was an article in the New York Times this week titled, Shopping for Chaise Longues, in which a couple of architects recommended 8 chaise longues, "comfortable enough to curl up on with a book on a chilly afternoon". I'm a big fan of chaise longues; in fact, I have a well-used, quilt covered one in a corner of my bedroom, so I turned to the article. What was I thinking? It was a clear illustration of why, even if I could afford it (and I can't) I'd never hire anyone to advise me about this stuff.

Prices of the 8 chaises selected by the architects range from the $26,000 chaise pictured at the top of this post to the $2500 chaise pictured below (which doesn't look like a chaise at all to me, but DOES look like a couch missing an arm....and while I'm at it...$26,000.00 for a chaise? Seriously? Who are these people??????)
















None of the 8 in the article looks comfortable enough to curl up on with a book on a chilly afternoon, but this is exactly what I like to do on my infinitely comfortable, under-$1000 chaise, which I purchased at Crate and Barrel a few years ago:

The Princess and the Pea...

For some time I've needed a new mattress, but I didn't realize how much I needed one until I went to AZ in May for Mike's graduation. The hotel I stayed in had sleep number beds, and I cranked mine up to a very firm setting and got my first good night's sleep in a long, long time.

When I got back to Dallas I began researching mattresses. This is not an easy thing to do, because mattress manufacturers rename identical products for each different store that sells them. I don't know of any other commodity for which this is done, but for mattresses it's perfectly legal. I knew from personal experience that the result is confusion for the buyer, but I didn't realize until I began looking into it that this is also the purpose of the practice: to confuse the buyer, so that you can't find the lowest price for any particular model. I know that this sounds like a paranoid delusion, but it's a fact.

It wasn't always this way. Ironically, the practice came about after trade laws were passed in the 1970's prohibiting manufacturers from setting a price floor (a minimum sales price) for mattresses. Although the goal was to help consumers by keeping prices competitive and therefore low, the result has been the opposite. A proliferation of discount mattress showrooms opened up after these laws were passed, selling mattresses for prices that were often considerably lower than department stores. In response, department stores negotiated with mattress manufacturers to provide "exclusive" department store models. That doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that the thing that makes these models exclusive is usually very minor: it might be something as insignificant as the color of the ticking, or the pattern of the stitching, or there may be a few more or less coils, etc. But no salesperson will tell you that, and the result is that in 2010, each mattress company manufactures a few different mattresses that are then marketed with dozens of different names, making it impossible for consumers to compare prices and get the best deal. This practice is a manufacturers dream, and it's now so widespread that even discount stores carry models that are exclusive to them.

As if that weren't enough, the price of mattresses, like everything else, have risen astronomically. Google "most expensive mattress" and you'll find the Vividus by Hastens for...drum roll...$59,750.00. That's right; by the time you add tax and shipping, over $60,000 for a mattress. Seriously? Of course, I wasn't looking at the Vividus. In fact, I decided after sleeping on the sleep number mattress that I didn't want an innerspring mattress at all, but I have a king size bed, and king size sleep number mattresses, manufactured by either Select Comfort or their parent company, Comfortaire, ran anywhere from $1100 to over $3000.

Two of my brothers have Tempurpedic mattresses and love them, so I decided I'd also check out memory foam mattresses. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Brookstone's at NorthPark where I spent a very relaxing half-hour on two Tempurpedic models (15 minutes on each). Both of them felt wonderful, but the price for a king size ran from $1700 (mattress only)/$2200 (mattress and foundation) to $4,000 (mattress only)/$4500 (mattress and foundation). A boatload of money!

12 years ago I spent a boatload of money on the mattress and box springs I'm now replacing: a top of the line Serta pillowtop. It came with with a 20-year-warranty but that didn't keep it from sagging, beginning at about year 8. Sagging in year 8 isn't covered under the warranty (of course) but suppose the mattress had a manufacturing defect...what would be covered? With Serta, I'd be responsible for 1/10 the dealer retail price times the number of years used. I paid $1200 for the mattress and box springs set, so multiply $120 x 8 years...under the warranty, I'd be responsible for $960 plus shipping costs...some warranty, huh? It's similar for other manufacturers, e.g., the Select Comfort Sleep Number bed has a 20-year limited warranty. If your bed fails in the first 2 years, you're in luck: replacement is totally covered. However, after that, the consumer is responsible for paying 20% of the retail cost plus 4% for each year since purchase. So if you paid $2000 and the pump failed in year 6, your out-of-pocket cost to get the mattress fixed under the 20-year warranty would be $880, plus shipping and handling (of course).

All of which left me thinking I didn't want to spend a boatload of money on a mattress this time around. But what were my alternatives? Here's a great site where I read a lot about mattresses: Sleeplikethedead.com. The first thing I discovered at this site is that memory foam mattresses have the highest consumer comfort rating: 81%. This is followed by an 80% comfort rating for air beds, 79% for water beds, 78% for latex, 66% for futons and 61% for innersprings (!!!). The site has received and sorted over 9,000 consumer reviews on mattress types, and provides a breakdown of how many reviewers responded for each type of mattress, e.g., 4476 for memory foam, but just 253 for water beds, so 79% of 253 water bed users rated water beds as comfortable.

The site also provides comfort ratings by mattress brand, and mattress type is listed after mattress brand. I spent hours looking up memory foam mattresses on the internet using this table, and in doing so, I read about off gassing, defined as the evaporation of volatile chemicals in non-metallic materials at normal atmospheric pressure. The chemicals used in making memory foam are, for the most part, petroleum based, and those chemicals, and some of the fire retarding agents (e.g., PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers), emit fumes that can cause reactions in people with chemical sensitivities. Off gassing occurs with all mattress types, including innerspring mattresses.

I looked at and read about mattresses sold at a number of places, including Costco, Sam's, Walmart, and Overstock.com as well as mattresses sold only online, and I read endless customer reviews of individual mattresses. As expected, reading the reviews confirmed that no mattress is right for every person. For example, although 87% of Tempurpedic customers love their mattresses, 13% do not, and some of the 13% who don't love Tempurpedics really hate them! I learned that no matter what the cost, most mattresses can be expected to last without noticeable deterioration for about half the warranty, ergo, 5 years for a mattress with a 10-year-warranty; 8 to 12 years for a mattress with a 20-year-warranty.

So what did I end up buying? And where did I buy it, and how much did it cost? To be continued...

time for a new...HOT WATER HEATER!!!

Why do these things happen in the middle of the night, instead of in the middle of the afternoon? I guess I should say, why do we discover them at night? I discovered this because, walking barefoot across the saltillo tile, I hit a wet spot...which is not a good feeling. So I turned on the lights and thought, there's only one place I can think of that water might be coming from near that spot...so I opened the door of the closet that houses the main hot water heater and had an Aha! Oh, crap! moment....

This is not a good thing to see. And then there's this alarming Danger! sign:

It's 11:58 PM on Sunday night as I write this. I have to be up for work in a few hours but instead of going to bed, I'm draining the main hot water heater. I've shut off the gas (at least I hope I have...the valve is very counterintuitive) and I've shut off the water...at least I think I have...following these instructions:

and I've gone into the back yard and detached the garden hose from its rightful place, and dragged it into the house and attached it to the hot water heater, which I've then turned on to drain into the flower beds outside the house, the water being only tepid because the heater has stopped working big time. I'd stay home tomorrow to have it replaced except I didn't bring my laptop home, sooooo...in a few hours I'll drive in to work; I'll call a plumber and make an appointment ASAP to have the old hot water heater removed and a new one installed...and one day later this week I hope I'll be able to telecommute while that happens. The floor that supports it will have to be replaced too; this is just a 30" x 30" piece of plywood, an improvement over the pressboard (!!!) that was used for the original hot water heater that came with the house. When that baby went, the heater fell through the pressboard (of course). Ah, the joys of home ownership...OK, I'm done whining (for NOW)...

more later though.

Virgo Virgo Virgo...

Did Imelda Marcos start like this? I do love shoes.

Summer skirts...the long and the short of it...

I spent the weekend reorganizing the big closet in my bedroom. There are two closets in the master bedroom: a big one and a small one. I usually manage to keep the small one fairly tidy, but the big one had become a catch all. It was time to go through everything and I did, with the end result being the closet is now pristine, but my bedroom is a disaster, because that's where I moved the discards and I haven't packed all of them up yet.

Still, it feels good to finally have my closet organized again. After the fire, I thought I'd gotten pretty good at paring down and discarding what I don't need, and I think for the most part that's true, but going through my closet and the armoire in my bedroom, both of which were filled with clothes, I felt like I was just this side of becoming a hoarder, a truly frightening idea. However, with an empty armoire and an organized closet, I think I can safely say that there's no danger of that in my immediate future, thank goodness!

I've posted some big pics because I'm pleased with the result. The closet didn't always look like this. When we bought the house, this closet was nice and big but it had a single, sagging, pressboard shelf on 3 walls with a wooden clothes rod suspended beneath it. There were also two truly awful built-ins that managed to waste almost as much space as they occupied. After the fire I gutted this closet, painted it, and designed the new one, using Elfa shelving from The Container Store. Closet Maid makes excellent knock-offs of this shelving sold for a fraction of the cost at Home Depot, but I wanted several features that were unique to Elfa so in this closet I used Elfa.

I hung it all myself. It's very easy to do. You simply locate the studs, attach the top track, (a horizontal metal piece - make sure it's level) to the studs, and then just slide the hanging standards (vertical support pieces) onto the lip on the bottom of the top track. Attach the shelf brackets where ever you want a shelf. You can vary the depth of the shelves you're using, and although I like the ventilated shelving for a lot of reasons, Elfa now makes solid shelving too. You can have the shelving cut to size, or you can buy long pieces and cut them yourself (I've done both). I'm pleased with the end result, if I do say so myself.

Post Script: Goodwill Industries is probably pleased too. After initially posting this, I dropped off a full carload of discards.

Just call me Martha...

OK, it was TOTALLY worth it that I declined brunch last Sunday in favor of working on my yard, because when I got home from work on Monday night, not only did the yard look good, but there was a sticky note on my front door telling me that my yard had been chosen by the Homeowner's Association as Yard of the Month for April! Woo Hoo!

I confess that I've secretly coveted this particular honor for many years, but I never thought I'd get it because I thought that you had to belong to the Homeowner's Association to be considered, and for reasons I won't go into here, that's a membership I let lapse years ago. I think it's pretty cool that it's not the case; that you don't have to belong. But I also thought I'd never get it because most of the recent recipients have posted signs in their yard telling who "does" their yard, e.g., they have gardeners or landscaping services putting in their flower beds, whereas I "do" my beds myself.

That is apparently coincidental: when I went to pick up the yard sign I found out how it works, and it couldn't be simpler: they drive around and look for the prettiest yard that month. Period. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that my yard made the cut. In addition to the honor of that (and I really do consider it an honor), I get a gift certificate to Calloway's. Another woo hoo! I'm posting some pics to show off my flowers. Thank goodness they didn't have to see the back yard, though!

Snow Day

I don't know how much snow we got officially, but it started snowing early this morning; when I got up at 4:45 the ground was already white, and now it's after midnight and it still hasn't stopped. I've lived in Dallas for 26 years and I've never seen anything close to this much snow here. Tonight I went out to walk in it, a real pleasure for a transplanted Minnesotan like myself, and I hadn't gone half a block before I saw part of a huge live oak down in the street, from the weight of the snow. Finally, I understand why so many live oaks have rather elaborate wires running in their branches...

I worked from home today, and it was a long day of work: I was online at 7:15 and worked pretty much straight through until 6:00, when I took a break to walk through the neighborhood, then I went back on for another 45 minutes, from 7:30 until 8:15. Dreary.

But then I went out into the snow, and everything was muted, not so muted as the twenty inch snowfalls I remember from my childhood in Minnesota, but muted, softened, and it took me back. Down the street, where the live oak had fallen, neighbors were out with a chainsaw, cutting it up and clearing it for the family on whose lawn it stood, because they were away and didn't even know about it. This tree was huge; this was not a small amount of work, but these neighbors were cheerfully sawing up and hauling away this tree in the snow. I took pics for them to give to the insurance company. It was sort of festive, all things considered.

And then I came home and went back to work for a bit in my gameroom, which is where I worked today. It's a great room with a tall pitched ceiling, dark wood wainscoting, a wall of bookcases, and floor to ceiling, dark wood plantation shutters. Today and tonight I've had the shutters open and to look out from that cozy room through the dark wood shutters onto SNOW...it is so beautiful. I can't get over it. I've taken lots of pics, but have yet to figure out how to download and post them on my mac, so they won't accompany this post, and I don't know if they'd convey the magic anyway. But it was sort of an "Aha!" moment for me: it's so beautiful to look out, through the shutters, and see snow.

And my unhappiness with work, and the soft beauty of the snow has got me thinking: Why Dallas? Why stay here?

Maybe it's time to think about moving on.

Summer Things...

Here are a few of the things that I love most about summer:

1. Sunflowers. Aren't they gorgeous? Every week I buy a bunch at the grocery store, and put them in a tall narrow vase in my kitchen. I feel good every time I look at them.

2. Cicadas. They've finally started singing in the trees at night, and I love stepping outside and hearing them.

3. Thunbergia, or Black Eyed Susan vine. I telecommuted today, and having cut 3 hours of driving out of my day, after work I took a quick trip to a nursery that's close to my house to look at plants. I was over the moon to find one of these vines with orange flowers, wilting a bit in the heat (it was just under a hundred degrees today). I bought the plant, brought it home, and drenched it before taking this pic. Isn't it beautiful? This weekend I'll pick up a trellis and plant it in a sunny spot.















4. Ice tea. I make it with mint and my house is fragrant with the scent of it right now. Mike called last week from Arizona for the recipe, so I know it's good.

5. Pasta salads. In 1985 there was a restaurant in Dallas called Massimo's, and they had wonderful pasta salads, including one made with penne pasta, fresh basil, tomatoes, Kalamata olives, and mozzarella called Pasta Pugliese. Massimo's eventually closed, but somewhere along the way, the recipe for the ever popular Pasta Pugliese was published in the paper. Tonight I made it for dinner.

this 'n that

After some absolutely gorgeous warm, sunny weather, it's cold and rainy again today. I don't mind; I'm snug inside and anyway, we need the rain. I'm happily at home because I had jury duty this morning. It was just petit jury duty, and no one was called. We were dismissed a little before noon. I went to Luna de Noche, where I had a bowl of tortilla soup, then I ran some errands and came home, where the furnace is once again on and I'm in the long, involved process of switching out the brown velvet slipcovers of winter for the white duck slipcovers of summer. It's a long, involved process because I wash and dry the old slipcovers before packing them away, and I have to do some ironing to the duck slipcovers to make them look decent on the couches. Still, it always cheers me up to make this switch, and seeing the summer slipcovers on the couches reminds me that the warm weather will be back soon, I'm sure of it.

I put out bedding plants over the weekend, so my patio has once again come alive. I love to look out and see flowers, and I got a good start on all of that this weekend. Right now I have flowers inside the house too, beginning just inside the front door, on the hall table, I've placed a big blue glazed pot filled with scented jasmine; at the opposite end of that table is a big vase full of peach blossoms; on the secretary around the corner is a potted pussy willow, and in the kitchen, on the countertop, a blooming phalaenopsis orchid. Things are not so cheerful in the living room, where the banana plant has a strange sort of white, cottony mold, and I need to do more reading before I decide whether to try to treat, or dump everything and start over, complete with new soil.

And I know it's only March, but I can't help but think of eecummings:

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
-it's april (yes,april;my darling) it's spring!

Sunday night thoughts - beef carbonnade

I was going to play Patrick's Sunday meme, but when I looked at it...List the seven varieties of Hamburger, Tuna or Chicken Helper that are the most appealing...I realized I absolutely could not do it. I NEVER buy hamburger, tuna or chicken helper. Never. The only time in my life that I resorted to those...mixes...was in the late 70's when we'd gutted our kitchen in Chicago and for 3 months I had to prepare dinner for 4 in an electric frying pan or on a hotplate, and I had the pleasure of washing the dishes in the tub...YUCK. We ate like Henry VIII for months after that, because the new kitchen included double ovens, one of which came equipped with a spit...a wonderful thing to have...and I fell into the habit of buying various roasts, but especially pork roasts, that I cooked slowly and lovingly on that spit, and served with julienned, buttered, steamed rutabaga on the side, a la James Beard (don't knock it unless you've tried it...rutabaga is a delicious winter vegetable), with cranberry sauce and a tossed salad and loaves of homemade French bread, a la Julia Child...flour, water, salt, yeast, no sugar, no shortening. These days, cooking for myself, admittedly I'm not preparing meat on a spit, and I have lots of quick and easy things that I make myself for dinner, e.g., black bean burritos topped with extra sharp cheddar, sour cream, and jalapeno jelly, for example. But sometimes, when the weather is turning, I get in the mood for one of the dishes I used to prepare when I was first learning to cook...and if it's more work than I'd usually be inclined to go to for just myself, I go ahead and make it anyway, because I don't usually mind eating it for several nights.

Tonight was such a night. I spent part of this afternoon potting pansies and dianthus and cyclamen for the winter, and tonight I decided it's been entirely too long since I've made and devoured a beef carbonade. So I went to the supermarket and picked up the ingredients, including a 24 ounce bottle of Heineken's, and even as I type the house smells WONDERFUL as this stew cooks slowly in my kitchen. This stew is really good served over brown rice, and the better the carrots, in terms of flavor, the better the end result.

You can see that Ike, the stray who found me the weekend of Hurricane Ike, and who's staying with me until I can find a home for him, is chillin' on the couch, no doubt thinking if he minds his manners, there's some beef carbonnade for him too.

something beautiful

When I walked into my kitchen this morning, this orchid was in bloom...isn't it gorgeous?