A Good Diversion

Well, Princess is now settled in her dorm and beginning her college adventure.  I’m glad you can’t see tear stains on a computer screen.  I’m also glad that I have a wise husband who encouraged me to immerse myself in building our next house in order to take my mind off this empty nest.

So I will immerse myself into one of my favorite forms of therapy - the pleasurable hobby of perusing home plans magazines and books for new home ideas.  It is one of the best parts of building a new home.  Charlie and I mark pages of books and tear out magazine photos and exchange books and debate different aspects and build on each others’ ideas and (fortunately!) create a vision that we both begin to fall in love with.  We’re thinking Arts and Crafts style so we’ve bought a couple of books with lots of great photos to help with our designs.  Bungalow Style: Creating Classic Interiors in Your Arts and Crafts Home by Treena Crochet provides an impressive overview of the history of the style.  Greene & Greene Masterworks by Bruce Smith and Alexander Vertikoff offers endless beautiful photos of the influential architects’ “ultimate bungalows”.

On a more practical note, we walked around our current home to determine what we wanted in the new home.  For example, we don’t want a dining room or a basement but we do want two offices and a large garage with a workshop area.  Perhaps we could combine a guest room with an all-purpose room.

We talked about what furniture we wanted to keep and how much storage we’d like to have.  Our future home grew by a few square feet from its original sketch once we took all of these things into account!

Today I put together a 3-ring binder of some of the pictures we’ve collected – several front elevations, lots of kitchen cabinet ideas, fireplaces, porches, stairways, trimwork - lots of pics of our favorite parts, building a binder of wishes and dreams.

I’m glad to have this engrossing project ahead of me.  The time is right for new beginnings.