Tag: Photos

Fitting me like a glove

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I posted a year ago, this would be the first time I’ve had a tailor-made personal space. How heavenly! Look at those two windows higher up on the wall, allowing for shelving below and cross-circulation of air in the warmer months in addition to natural light.

Roughly 12-by-14 feet, including the closet and writing corner, much of it would be taken up with a very comfy double-sized bed, but the room was also intended to enclose my 200-plus journals, rows of LPs and CDs, a turntable and Bose stereo, hundreds of books, plus clothing, filing cabinets, and a writing corner. Hey, I’ve been downsizing.

The room is isolated, tucked away from everything, unlike the previous space where I could keep an eye on passers-by on the street and deliveries to the back door, the entry that got 98 percent of our use. I could even see the deer in our yard. The new room, in contrast, feels more like a treehouse, even with that double-sash window that displays a corner of the ocean and all of its changes.

~*~

My bedroom is the smallest of the four, but it fits me like the proverbial glove. If I sometimes think of it as being like a treehouse, that was something I never had as a kid, though I did climb often to the top of the elm in our back yard. I can nearly clamber to its tippy top in my sleep, almost 70 years later, hundreds of miles to the east.

In our renovations, the room is also envisioned as a place for my continuing downsizing, a consideration for my heirs who have no interest in my journals, manuscripts, recorded music, clothing, or ancestral snapshots and formal photographs. I don’t want to burden them with any of that. Still, despite my previous efforts, there’s so much I still need to sort through in my remaining time. Back to those journals, manuscripts, recordings, clothes, and photos. Some of that labor may even lead to future posts here.

Back when we moved into our Dover house, the one with the red barn in New Hampshire, I needed tons of space for my literary projects – everything was on paper. Not so now, especially after so much of that paper is now available to readers in digital publication.

What we did with the wall between mine and the front bedroom is especially delightful. Originally, the space was supposed to be divided between the two bedrooms, but then she who must be obeyed ceded it all to me, except for the space overhead. Her reason was that this was the wall where she decided her bed should go, and the bed would have obstructed the closet. OK, then.

Gee, I had been thinking about what might go up my side of the space. Instead, I have a bit of upper wall, which makes me wonder what might be displayed there instead. My Far West cow skull, perchance? Or a moose antler rack from around here?

My proudest part of my upstairs quarters is the writing center carved out of what would have been closet, up against an outside window. Here I can see a corner of the harbor and yet also have so much at hand overhead.

~*~

The back two bedrooms – mine and the one we’re designating as guest room – are largely square in their floorplan but were to have a signature charred beam running upward along the exterior wall, a reminder of the 1886 downtown fire that charred our rafters but didn’t get further than that. For us, these are also reminders of a chimney fire or two that the house also survived. For the most part, the rooms are mirror images of each other, except for differences in the wall that has the closets. More on that in a later post or two.

When it came time for the drywall to go up, we yielded on preserving that detail and instead went for an unbroken wall, mostly because of the expense of the labor needed to execute the details. Alas.

~*~

In the renovations, my room took priority because so much stuff from where we were dwelling downstairs had to move up to make room for ongoing work as it shifted to the first floor.

Besides, I was tiring of trying to sleep and write in the same chamber as the clothes washer and its noise. That future dining room was getting very crowded. We would need it as a staging area for the next stages of renovation.

Just to thicken the plot

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As we looked for ways to personalize our bedrooms, I quickly settled on white as the dominant paint color for mine. We had already agreed on keeping the downstairs walls white, on the creamy side, especially for the way it enhances the marvelous natural light we have here on the island.

In my case, I wanted the purest white possible, a reminder of the incredible beacon at the fringe of the moon immediately before and after a full solar eclipse. On a more practical note, the white theme guaranteed that the line between the ceiling and walls would be continuous rather than jagged.

To close off the closet, I wanted a curtain rather than a door, in part to maximize space in the room and in part for a bold accent. I quickly gravitated toward indigo for the fabric. Yes, I have a taste for sushi and sashimi and Japanese design in general. The curtain inspiration, should you ask, springs from a few favorite restaurants. Besides, I have a long love of ascetic clarity, including the Shakers as well as Zen, even before I became Quaker and flirted with its historic Plain style, which can also be seen here.

The bedspread and bookshelves would add their own colors and textures to the mix.

~*~

Playing around with the blueness, I even did some online scans and duly noted:

My desired bedroom blue accent
Somewhere around 13 red, 27 green, 54 blue, 100% opacity
Just give me a name, somehow
Hex #0D1B36, for starters
As for the purest white of whites?
Is it even possible?

Just so I’d be ready when it came time to trot off to the paint store or fabric shop.

~*~

Christmas intervened before the upstairs was ready for painting.

Gift-giving in our family often turns into an art, sometimes including items found at yard sales. Other times it includes items you never knew you wanted or needed, though you soon discover otherwise – I’ve often been advanced on high-tech edges that way.

So, this past holiday, I unwrapped one box and encountered sample strips of cloth, all blue, nine in total, traditionally Japanese and dark blue. Along with an offer to make the curtain from my fabric of choice.

Just to see how they might work in the room.

I had no idea it could get this complicated.

They were darker than the indigo I originally envisioned, as well as more intriguing. How would each one interact with the rest of the elements in the room? I invited reactions from others in the family, and weighed those in with my own observations. What caught my fancy early on soon moved toward more subtle patterns. I’ll leave it at that for now.

The full array plus a batik dinner napkin that had started my thinking.

~*~

Beyond a café curtain on the double-hung sash window, I’m planning no “window treatments” in the room. (How I detest that term.) Privacy isn’t an issue, considering the height of the other windows, nor is direct sunlight in a north-facing room.

~*~

Continuing with the color choice palette and turning to the floor, online searches quickly convinced me that dark blue would be too much, even in small exposures. Dark red, which we had in Dover, would have resulted in a red-white-and-blue cliché. I started leaning on hunter green but began wondering if going lighter, as others in this project were thinking, might make sense.

However this turned out would be nothing like anything I had before.

Plenty of space for hanging clothes, by New England standards

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A traditional New England home comes without closets, or perhaps has some quirky ones that were added later but inefficiently. It’s an unanticipated jolt for those of us who grew up elsewhere.

That tradition was something our renovation sought to rectify. Indeed, maximizing storage space was a pivotal consideration in our planning. As I’ve noted, our present home is smaller than the previous one, not that its closets were notable, even before considering all the storage capacity we had in the red barn. Yes, the barn that inspired this blog. The garden shed we added here is much, much smaller.

A few locals have been surprised by the results – what they see as closets everywhere in the newly redesigned upstairs. Each bedroom has one. Although these are shallower than a full-sized walk-in closet, they are deep enough for hanging clothes, which is our primary need.

The key in adding these came in realizing that the distance between the gable windows was two feet, enough to run narrow closets along the dividing line between the front and back bedrooms. Our original plan had those closets alternating, half for one bedroom and the other half for its neighbor. But that changed when we decided to give all of that opening to the back bedrooms, which were also smaller.

In compensation, the two front bedrooms got a shallow loft running atop those closets, as well as their own closets elsewhere in the reconfigured rooms.

Quite simply, the closet in each bedroom is unique.

Guest room closet will have three doors.

Additional storage space appears in the laundry room as well as a small hallway broom closet. Yes, even a place to stash the vacuum cleaner.