The Walls Unpainted

Everyone has a history. We were all something slightly different on our way to becoming the someone we are now. The person we fall in love with at first is, after all, just a part of the person we love as we get older. In a house, too. There is a general accretion in a house of the personality or personalities that we bring to it. We, as new owners, love what we see, and yet there is this immediate impulse to alter that which we loved - the old fashioned-ness, the conservative, the age-worn. 

When C and I visited Wynnewood for the first time, it was very clear to me that this was an older woman's house. Older furniture, religious paintings, chintz bedcovers, lots of brown wood, as my friend Bill Doyle would say. The house flowed nicely. I could picture the older woman making toast or pouring a scotch (but never two). And not knowing her, not knowing one thing about her but what you could glean from family photos (three daughters) and inscriptions (husband an admiral, she a golfer) I still thought I had a sense of who she was, just from the way she lived - not wasteful, independent. Our friends the real estate agents said the family lived here forever, and so the children who were obviously grown must have been obviously young here at one point. No posters of the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix, although the electric green shag rug stayed in one of the bedrooms right to the end.

That era - the one of being a mother with young children - was not of this house now. This house was like my Grandma McGinity's house - built for an older couple, tea at five, ginger ale, grandchildren to play cards with or review their report cards or play piano with.

We're nearly at the end of our initial changes. I'm hesitant to even say renovation or restoration now, which is what I said weeks ago when we started. Obviously, some things that she had lived with we wouldn't, like the 90 year old electrical wiring, or the lead paint. The house wasn't alarmed, now it is. The floors were sanded and restained. We had to bring the house to a certain point of modernity. But the house wasn't bad in itself. We fell in love with the house for what it was, and then moved to change it into something else. It had its own ghosts and memories, most of which we've probably put under one more blanket, one more coat of paint, in our zeal.

I'm not regretful. It's just that in this life we don't get one thing, anything, without giving up something else up. We'll be happy here. It will be our house, and the microwave and the toaster will work at the same time, and the scratches made in the house, and the flowers in the garden, will be of our choosing.

Anyway, on to the photos of the house as we found it.

Here is the sunroom, looking toward Wynnewood Rd.

And looking toward the back yard. The storm windows have tin tags, each numbered, each unique. The screens are down in the basement. The bookcase in the left corner was blocking a doorway to the living room. We took it out, first thing. It transformed the living room in terms of bringing light into what was a dark room.

Here is what we call the Girls' Room, upstairs. There was green carpeting here. I liked the iron beds, Christina no.

This was the middle room, which she had used as a sitting room. It will be the Boys' Bedroom. The closet below is about as big as a Cadillac.

The Master Bedroom. Marriage is all about compromise. When it comes to our sleeping arrangements, I've generally found myself on the wrong end of the compromise - when the bed was against the N wall I had the N side, when it was too close to the S wall I had the S side. I've demanded, and so far been ceded, the side without the radiator. I kept thinking that my brain would be softly boiled as I slept the sleep of the brave Celts.

An alternate view, looking toward the sleeping porch on the left, which will become an office for Christina.

The sleeping porch. It had some bad water damage, and so we stripped out the walls and reinsulated the whole shebang.

An alternate view. This was the husband's desk, with his file cabinet. We ripped the ceiling down and found the original tongue and groove paneling, which we've had painted.