Black And White And Loved All Over

This past month I've been focusing all my home project enthusiasm, efforts, and budget into my office-slash-our guest bedroom. Since I work from home (and from Ugly Mugs, a beloved coffee shop two miles from here), this is the probably the room I spend the most waking hours in. I think I also devoted attention to this space in honor of starting to write my novel here (and probably also to procrastinate from doing so).

This room had been feeling dark and gloomy; it was painted a deep blue-green that I didn't hate but that wasn't doing this space any favors and was sucking some of the energy out of it. And I need energy here, since this is the room in which I have to decide to write rather than, say, deciding to take a nap. Also, the old paint had been given to me years ago by a girl who I once thought a good friend who then blew me off fantastically for the craziest reason that I could never possibly blog about but for which you will have to trust me. Anyway, bad connotations with this old color. Had to start fresh.

There are four things I had been wanting to try:

1) Paint a ceiling blue.
2) Stripe a wall.
3) Use the famous, dreamy Benjamin Moore color, "Palladian Blue."
4) Make pompom trim curtains.

I did all four, over a period of a few weeks. Started by painting the walls "Alabaster" by Sherwin Williams, which I've used in other places around the house. It's also the color I'm slowly starting to paint all of my trim. (For the record, it is apparently exactly the same color as Benjamin Moore's "White Dove.") It took three coats to cover the green. The ceiling was actually easier to paint than I imagined, especially because I used this tool to tackle the edges. It is now "Palladian Blue" by Benjamin Moore.


After that was done, I waited a week and then went back to add the stripes to one wall. I taped them off to be 12 inches high:


I did that trick where, before painting the stripes, you roll the whole wall with the base color (the Alabaster) to "seal" the tape so that the stripes don't bleed. It worked great and I had really clean lines and barely any touchups to do once I pulled the tape off. The gray paint color is "Wickham Gray" by Benjamin Moore (the same color of my living room and hallway, which are right outside the door of this room.

Plus I got to take down the old metal blinds we've had in here since we moved up and hang some curtains I love. I went with the Ikea Lenda panels, which I have in almost every room of my house because the quality is so good, they come in the 118"-long length that you can do floor-to-ceiling curtains with, and they're so inexpensive (about $17 per panel for the longest length). We don't have an Ikea in Nashville, but I get these from eBay. I always just cut off the top loops and attach them to clip rings, so they look more fancy-like. I recommend washing, drying, and ironing them, even though it's a pain in the ass, before hanging or hemming them since they shrink by at least four inches in the wash. This time I trimmed my Lendas with pompom trim from createforless.com. This trim isn't usually cheap in large quantities, but I got the smaller pompoms from this website and was able to pay $18 for 36 yards of trim (I did two colors, so paid about $40 for all the trim I needed for four panels). The time it took to sew two kinds of trim around all four corners of four panels? A lot. The curtain rods and clips are Martha Stewart Living from Home Depot.


I'm not showing you the "office" side of the room yet because there are still a few things yet for me to do over there.

The thing I'm most afraid of is the thing I want the most. Well, almost the most: what I want the very most is a happy marriage and two happy, healthy daughters who know they can always count on me and who outlive me. But beyond THAT, what I want is to write a novel. It's what I have always wanted. Since I was a little girl. I'm one of the lucky ones who always knew what I wanted to "be" when I grew up--a writer. Having Tessa 4.5 years ago gave me the courage to break away from the corporate world, where I was doing editing and writing work, and go out on my own as a freelancer. Even when the babies were little, I needed to contribute my fair share to our bank account or else go back to office work, so I have taken most everything that's come my way: most notably, I've written hundreds (thousands?) of blog posts about chimney sweeping. And while I'm proud to make a living with the pen/keyboard, there's been one blaring item on my bucket list that tops all other items. And I have let it scare the pants off me.

Around a bonfire on New Year's Eve 2013, some good friends and I all wrote down on a scrap of paper what we most wanted out of 2014 and then tossed our hopes into the fire. Mine said, "Start writing my novel." One of my best friends wrote, "Have a baby," and her baby is almost fully cooked now. But it has been a slow start for me, mostly because I started all wrong. At some point in January, I Googled "How to write a novel." Ha. Ha. How lame is that? I was looking for info about length and organization, stuff like that. I came across some dude who writes sci-fi novels like it's his job (oh, because it is) and he advised this really strict methodology for outlining all of your chapters before you start writing. That made sense to me, so I did a little bit of work on that, then put it away ... for months. I found it incredibly boring and also daunting to map out every plot point ahead of time. What I had/have was a pretty general idea of how I want things to go in my book, but most all of the details are outstanding. Trying to foresee all of it robbed every bit of joy from the process.

And then my friend Reid gave me the perfect book for my birthday, which as Angela Chase would say, "just fit into this empty place in my heart." It's Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg, and it's a book about writing. Which is basically the last thing I wanted to read, as I've read so many, and there comes a point when it's just like, OK, go write something already. But this book beguiled me right off the bat, and it appealed to my creative process, which I realized was not at all the same process of that sci-fi writer dude. When I read the following, why I had squandered the past nine months not writing my novel made all the sense in the world to me:

"I believe that fiction feeds on itself, grows like a pregnancy. The more you write, the more there is to draw from; the more you say, the more there is to say. The deeper you go into your imagination, the richer that reservoir becomes. You do not run out of material by using all that's in you; rather, when you take everything that is available one day, it only makes room for new things to appear the next." 

Oh, God, yes. So I just started writing. And it's been so very fun; I fall asleep at night thinking of my characters, and whenever I have a moment to daydream my mind goes to them (or else to home decorating and redecorating, which is almost as fun). I may end up writing a stupendously shitty novel and it may never be published and it may take me five years to write, as these kids take up damn near all of my time, but I promise I will just be glad to have done it and to be able to tell my daughters that I did it.

Finally, I read something else that has helped me get over my starting-to-write-my-novel hump, and it's this, said by Elizabeth Gilbert on, yes, Oprah:

For the record, the ages of the other people in these photos is: 34, 4.5, and nearly 2.