is there any more pie?

I can’t promise this will be my last extreme home makeover post.  But I hope so, for your sakes.

First, a brief Family Couch History:

1972, a $25 yard sale couch, one of those wooden frames with six cushions.  I bought cheap cushion covers, ate a poisoned egg roll and threw up in the bags holding the covers all the way home. Now you know why decorating makes me queasy.

1975, bought a settee from Retired Mountain Lady for $1.  Covered the holes with an old quilt.  Also used an old Kansas church pew for seating.

1978, bought a brand new giant sectional that lasted forever and resisted ketchup, mustard and coffee.  We loved that thing.  It also doubled as a guest bed.

1993:  new home, replaced the sectional with two loveseats.

1996: bought a big brown couch and a matching chair at a discount furniture’s parking lot sale for $400 because company was coming for a high school graduation and the faded, ripped love seats had pitch stains from an oversized Christmas tree. 

2004: bought the aqua settee at a consignment store.

Please note:  Banjo Man was never present when this stuff was purchased and, for better or worse, had no input into the decisions.

Present day:

Tuesday night Banjo Man wanted to drive up to the Big Suburbs where the main road is lined with every box store and chain restaurant you can imagine.  It’s about a 45 minute trip and there is always traffic, so it is usually something to be avoided unless you have a specific purchase in mind.  But I had spent the previous three days working up furniture placement ideas on a website’s “2D Room Planner” and my husband figured we were ready to take the plunge.

In our 41 years together, Banjo Man has talked me into many, many things.  Many, many, MANY THINGS.

His three failures have been (a) wanting to shave his head, (c) starting a gourmet mustard business and (c) convincing me to buy new furniture.  The head-shaving thing was never going to happen again and he’d forgotten about the mustard, so he had accepted the losses and moved on.

But on the way to Shopping Mecca, his wife clutching room plans, he sensed victory at last.

Here is where the adventure began.

Nina, a lovely young woman, greeted us at the door.  Banjo Man was thrilled–he now had an accomplice!  “TELL HER–YOUR NAME IS NINA, RIGHT?  TELL NINA WHAT WE WANT!!!”

“I’m going to look around…”

“YOU HAVE A LIST, DON’T YOU???  SHOW HER, SO NINA CAN FIND IT FOR US!!!!”

I clutched my list to my chest.  “I want to wander around a little first.”

After all, the store was the size of three football fields.  I sat down on a chocolate brown sofa that looked heavenly and yet wasn’t soft enough.  I bounced.  I frowned.  I stood.  Banjo Man hovered.

“What’s the matter with it?  It’s nice!  Why don’t we get that one?”

“It’s not very comfortable.  Could you lower your voice?”

Banjo Man sat on the couch, pats the microfiber cushion, leaned back, pretended to watch football.  “I think it’s comfortable.”

“It’s not your couch,” I muttered.  He wasn’t even going to sit on our future couch.  And he’s color blind and has a flat rear.  Anything with foam feels good–he’s not exactly picky.

“What?”

“Nothing.”  I shrugged and moved to another mock-living room area hoping he’d get the hint and go in the opposite direction.  After 40+ years, he should have known I need space and quiet in order to think and visualize.

He followed me.  And we went through the same routine six more times, until he was so baffled by my refusal to buy any one of the surrounding sofas he just couldn’t stand it.

“WHAT are you LOOKING for?”

“Something wide.  Something soft.  Something I can curl up on.”  I had started to get defensive.  “My ass will know it when it feels it.”

He wisely refrained from making a comment.

I test-sat another sofa, a tan corduroy double reclining monster that had possibilities.  I was all about the comfort.  My husband was appalled.

“You’re not getting something like that, are you?”

“No,” I lied.  But only because it wasn’t sink-into-comfy enough.  I liked the idea of a sofa with cup holders and reading lights.  “Why don’t you go ask Nina about chairs while I look around?”

The other part of tonight’s plan was for Banjo Man to buy his very first recliner so he could watch “Master Chef” (his favorite show) in style. He sighed and followed Nina to the Lazy Boy section–after I promised not to escape the store without him.  Fifteen minutes later he found me again.  He wasn’t sure about the recliners.  There were chairs that rocked and reclined and chairs that reclined and swiveled, but only one that did all three.  He absolutely needed to swivel, but balked at the size and the price tag of the leather beast that performed all three tricks.

So Banjo Man was once again on A Mission To Buy A Couch.  Tonight.  Before I could change my mind and decide to keep the red-striped chair.  So we shopped.

He liked everything and I liked nothing.  We snapped at each other and stayed ten feet apart, but he watched what I touched or sat upon or hesitated in front of.  He was clearly ready to pounce on any encouraging sign from me.  My hours of online research meant nothing–things I’d liked were discontinued or ugly or the wrong color or just plain uncomfortable.   I was hot, thirsty and cranky.  Extremely cranky.

We eventually circled the store and arrived back at the front doors, where Banjo Man became fixated on a dark greenish brown sectional.  He sat down and prepared for battle.  “What’s wrong with this?  It has a chaise, like you wanted.  The fabric’s soft, which you wanted.  You can make it any size you want, see?”

He showed me the display card with twenty-seven different configurations and the measurements of each piece.  I needed a magnifying glass.  I also needed fresh air.

“I’ll take that paper home,” I said, sitting down next to him.  “I can’t figure out how that would fit without doing the numbers.”

“Do them now.”  He leaned back, rearranged the throw pillows.  “We have time.  That’s what we’re here for.  Do you have a pen?”

“It’s comfortable,” I snapped, “but I don’t like the color.”

“You need to keep an open mind.  All I’m asking is that you keep an open mind,” he repeated, patting the cushion.  “This is nice. What’s wrong with the color?  I like it.”

“It’s too dark.”  My mind was closed.  I know colors.  I’m a quilter.

Nina explained we could order it in an array of fabrics, but it would take 8 weeks.  Not what my husband wanted to hear.  But he took the information sheet over to a lamp and called out the measurements of each piece for me to write down.

Way too much pressure for a woman whose only meal today had been a protein bar–12 hours ago.  I shrieked: “I’m not writing anything down.  I-have-to-do-this-at-home!”

It went downhill from there.

Banjo Man wouldn’t take no for an answer.  Nina clearly thought I was a bitch.  My blood sugar had dropped to my toes and I felt faint.  I needed cheese.  And yogurt.  And beef.  I needed time alone with graph paper so I wouldn’t make an expensive mistake and be stuck it with it for the rest of my life.   I stalked off, past the entry doors to another display of Someone Else’s Perfect Living Room where I sat down and felt sorry for myself.

I felt guilty hating the perfectly nice “sage” sectional.  I felt bad that I hadn’t fallen in love with any of the couches.  Especially because I’d shoved all my old furniture into the dining and kitchen areas and Jeff and Angela were coming over to play Mexican Train dominoes this weekend and I wanted to do a Meet The Parents night with Nancy’s future in-laws this month and our house would either look as if it was about to be repossessed or we would have to move everything back the way it was before and they would think we were insane and—

Wait a minute.  What am I sitting on?  I love the color, like beach sand, sort of brown but with white.  And it’s chenille—oooh, chenille, I like that.  And the chaise part looks perfect.  And maybe I can read the measurements on the info sheet…

My husband and Nina tiptoed over. Smiles were exchanged. We had a plan: I would take the measurements home and plug them into my room planner to see which pieces would work and I would return in the morning to order them.  We would go next door to the Mexican restaurant (beef! cheese!), then stop at another store to look at recliners (where the salesman served me coffee that wasn’t decaff so I stayed up until 4:30 AM obsessing over furniture arrangements, measuring walls and outlining configurations with masking tape).

It all worked out.  We’re going to sit happily-ever-after.

p.s.  This furniture purchase was made possible by the folks at Toyota, who recalled certain years of Toyota trucks (like mine) and very, very generously reimbursed the owners (like me) whose truck frames had been made from defective steel.  My husband thanks you, I thank you and my ass thanks you.

…or was today more like that “hoarders” show on tv?  I used to watch a BBC program where the hosts would make some poorly-dressed woman go through her closet and toss her favorite, beloved clothes “into the bin”.  I thought that seemed a little mean.

But I get it.  Self-improvement is a good thing sometimes.  At least around here, right now.

We’re getting rid of stuff.

When you see what I once considered to be worthy of bringing into my house, you’re going to laugh and wonder what on earth was she thinking????

Before I post pictures of the furniture I proudly–at least for a few years– displayed in my combo kitchen-dining-living room up (until 4 pm today, when Banjo Man surprised me by moving it down to the basement), I need to explain.

Just a bit of history, nothing to be afraid of.

About 15 years ago I went through a weird period in my life.  My two best writing friends’ husbands died within ten months of each other.  Two of the most emotionally damaged of my adopted children left the nest (one to a special school for disturbed teens, the other to a group home after a crime spree at the local mall), leaving those of us still at home bitter and exhausted from several years of unending stress.  My grieving friends, whose lives had changed so dramatically overnight, no longer brainstormed novels or looked forward to the next writers conference.  We huddled together, drinking gallons of coffee and talking about life while waiting for the storm of pain and disappointment to pass.

And then we discovered shopping.  Being thrifty souls, we prowled yard sales, thrift shops, auctions, consignment stores, church rummage sales, flea markets (even the famous Brimfield shows) and antique malls.  We would drive anywhere.  We would laugh until we couldn’t breathe.  Nancy taught us the secrets to garage sales (get up at dawn and run), Pat became the Queen of Salvation Army stores (Salle d’Armee) and I taught them how to bid at auctions and on ebay.

We gave each other the most wonderful and hilarious Christmas gifts.

We lured another writing buddy, Sharon from Massachusetts (in a previous post she was the gal in the pink socks riding a lawnmower who didn’t get to go to Scotland because her plane hit another plane on the runway) into going with us, so yard sale mornings turned into summer weekends of bargains and barbecues and general hilarity.   One of my finest purchases, aside from the guitar-shaped cake pan, was the upper half of a male mannequin.

On a whim one hot August morning I ripped up all of my blue wall-to-wall carpet and heaved it, yard by yard, down the steps to the back yard.   I pried up the edging strips, peeled away padding, vacuumed up 9 years of silt.   Why?  Looking back, I think I’d decided that day that future changes in my life should come from me, not at me.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Getting rid of the carpet was so satisfying that I found the “Junk Man” in the Yellow Pages (does anyone remember those?) and hired him to haul away worn out mattresses, dressers, desks, chairs and anything else that I didn’t need, didn’t like or was just plain tired of.  Including the massive pine dining room set and eight matching chairs.

I threw stuff out of windows, piled it in the driveway, sweat like a pig and cried.  Finally the Junk Man put up his hands and said, “Lady, you no worry about nuthin’.  Go sit down and have yourself a nice cold drink and letta the Junk Man take care of this.”

Thank you, Junk Man.  You were my hero.

Speaking of heroes….you should have seen my husband’s face when he came home from work that day and greeted his sweating, triumphant and dirty wife.  He carefully asked what happened to the carpet.

I pointed to the back yard, then waved my arm toward the empty living room and showed off the plywood floor.  “Doesn’t it look great?”

He suggested I take a shower and then we’d go out for pizza.  Over dinner he finally asked me where the furniture went.

It took three years to afford Pergo flooring.  In the meantime I painted the plywood white and eventually found a green and gold Oriental rug at an auction for $75.  One of my little rescue dogs took a shine to it (and not in a good way) so it didn’t last long, unfortunately.

The insanity continued.  Anything I liked I brought home.  We’re not talking antiques, though.  There were $10 bedroom sets, boxes of china or linens or silverware or pots for $1, a $5 quilt that was so smelly I had to wrap it in a garbage bag before Nancy would let it into her car (I washed it four times to get the nicotine stains out).  I washed so many vintage drapes from ebay we had to buy a new washing machine.  Garage sales were the worst, because with a couple of dollars in change we could fill the trunk of a car with things we didn’t know we needed.

I bought myself a pickup truck.

Whatever caught my fancy came home with me.  And as my shocked mother cried when she saw my latest acquisitions (the gold chairs), “There’s no rhyme or reason to it!”

That comment still makes me laugh.

I was the only one of us still coping with deadlines, up at dawn and writing 10-12 hours a day when I wasn’t searching for ruby-flashed glassware and vintage tablecloths.  I wore wrist braces to bed to counteract damage from typing and almost-daily migraines were just a fact of life.   Add nasty sessions in family court, ongoing conflicts with a bipolar teenager, college tuition payments, my beloved father’s death, writing 4-6 books a year and living with a surly 9th grade boy and you had a woman who needed a red-striped velveteen chair, boxes of unpolished silverplate and time with her friends.

It would take seven years for all of us to decide we had enough stuff.   But once a year we would have a “yard sale day”–which meant going to one yard sale, virtuously not buying anything and then spending the rest of the afternoon relaxing on Nancy’s porch–for old time’s sake.

This afternoon I bought a chenille sectional sofa.  All of the pieces match.  It is not bright mustard yellow or red striped or have white-chipped Shabby Chic paint.  It is new and doesn’t need Febreez.  I did not haul it home myself, because the furniture store will deliver it on Friday.  Now that I am 60 (almost) I may have finally crossed over into the Land of Good Taste.  And not a minute too soon.

My living room area is once again empty, except for a wicker couch (bought at an auction for $10, reupholstered by Banjo Man and covered with a $20 quilt from a flea market in Tennessee) and the HDTV.  The wicker couch is temporary, but it looks good in its new spot under the windows.

So here are some pics of what is going to the consignment store this weekend, if they will take it–the saleswoman at one place today turned up her nose when she saw these pictures on my digital camera.  Gosh, what a shock!

See the white chairs in the background?  Got ’em free.  Spray-painted them white.  Recovered the seats three times.  Painted an ugly dining table white.  I think their days are numbered.

The chair Banjo Man loved to hate and yet loved to sit in.

My two Frank Sinatras.

I’m hoping to get enough money out of the sofa to buy some sound equipment for the fiddle.  Wish me luck.

It has a marble top. I covered it with a round tablecloth most of the time, so it didn’t look too tacky.

And here’s the matching tacky coffee table. I think it belonged to Edith Bunker.  I always intended to paint it, but never got around to it.

I think I’ll tell the people at the next consignment store that I am cleaning out my elderly aunt’s 1950’s apartment.  It’s either that or admit buying this crap kept me sane.

p.s. the pie safe I’m keeping. where else would I put 83 vintage tablecloths?

It’s been a little busy around here since we bought the HDTV.   We moved all the old furniture (and I do mean old, not necessarily in a good way) out of the living room area and into the kitchen/dining area.   It’s one great big room.  And I used to think it was pretty, but over the past couple of years “Shabby Chic” has gone out of style and Banjo Man’s own label of “Crappy Crap” seemed the better description for what we owned.

It is long past time to purge.

Banjo Man said he never was so glad to see the end of my red-and-gold-striped chair in his life, so last night while he was sleeping, I covered it up with a tablecloth so he could make the coffee this morning without the chair annoying him.  The day I found it, in the attic of a barn which was part of an antique store, Banjo Man did not appreciate its beauty.  He grumbled the entire time he tied it into the bed of my truck and, when we stopped for a sandwich and I worried that someone would steal it, he said, “I sure as hell hope so.”

But it was the best seat in the house for eating popcorn.

And watching television.

Last night we had a unique experience:  we went to a furniture store.  We really did.  About 10 years ago my husband dragged me to every giant furniture store in the state.  He wanted a new couch and he wanted it bad.  Real bad.  But I had an injured shoulder and 15 minutes of testing sofas required Vicodin and ice.  It was a long month, though I avoided surgery and spending money on overpriced furniture.

My, how times have changed.

Details to follow later.

Including—ta dah!!!!–the finding of Nancy’s perfect wedding dress last Saturday!!!!!

Nope, not this one, Mom!!!!

We sure had a fun day.  She will be such a beautiful bride.  I can’t wait!

Banjo Man picked out his 70th birthday present today. He is now watching Saturday’s recorded football game, Nebraska vs. Washington.

Life is good when you have 120Hz and a 42″ HD screen. Having to move every single piece of furniture to set it up in the living room was no problem. Carrying the old 27″ analog set (“the beast”) downstairs to the basement? A little bit more difficult. So it’s sitting in the living room, too.

Things may never be the same here. Already we’re talking about saving up for one of these:

Imagine watching “Survivor”, “Amazing Race” and “Masterchef” in such comfort.  And don’t get me started on the appeal of the cup holders.

No, I am not kidding.  It’s either this or his ‘n hers recliners.  All the furniture I bought years ago at the consignment stores can go back from whence it came.   Goodbye formal sofa, French Provincial chairs, chipped marble-topped tables and Shabby Chic cabinets.  Hello, modern world.

There should be room for our music stands, amplifiers, microphones and instruments now.  Hallelujah.

Who knew HDTV could be so life-changing?

I wonder if he’s the same coyote who woke us up at 3 AM.

This picture was taken one morning last winter, after I’d spotted a coyote asleep in the woods very close to the dining room window.  When I rapped on the glass, he stood up and stretched.  Relieved himself.  Sleepily looked around.  Then staggered four feet and climbed up on the boulder as if it was a pillow-topped Serta.

Banjo Man opened the window and hollered at him, but this coyote was determined to ignore us.  He didn’t look well.

Two hours passed, while I googled “sick coyote” online.  According to my research, banging pots and pans was the best way to frighten a coyote.  If the noise didn’t make him leave, then I’d have to call the wildlife folks and ask for help.  Coyotes are supposed to be afraid of humans; if they’re not, then they can be dangerous or have rabies or be stalking your Shih Tzu (you can learn so much scary stuff on the internet).

Banjo Man half-heartedly banged a couple of pots together from the safety of an open window, but our coyote visitor wasn’t impressed.  Neither was I.  Time was a-wastin’ and I really, really wanted to get on with the day, so I strode outside on the deck and banged metal like a chef on meth.  I yelled, too.

He lifted his head, turned and gave me an insolent look.  Then he scrambled down from the rock and trotted off into the woods.  Thank goodness.

Eastern coyotes are bigger than the ones you see out west.  They mated with Canadian wolves long ago and can weigh 40-55 pounds. They’re tall, with spindly legs, and look like German Shepherds.  I once had to stop the car to avoid hitting three of them milling around like thugs in the middle of the road.   I had to nudge one out of the way with the front fender, and even then they acted as if it was no big deal.

We’re accustomed to hearing them howling and yipping at night, when they have those awful, “Hurray, we killed something!!” parties in the woods. But last night’s lone, loud, screaming, bone-chilling howls came from one coyote.  A coyote who was not at all far away and had something important to share with the world.

We think he was in our back yard, only a few yards from the screened bedroom window. A group of his bloodthirsty friends celebrated a recent kill deeper in the woods, but the Lone Ranger howled his pain or joy or warnings separately.

Next to our house.

For over an hour.

I don’t know when he shut up, because I cowered under the covers and finally lapsed into a coma.

I can only hope a herd of vicious white-tailed deer sneaked up on him and stomped him into silence.  Or the resident wild turkeys chased him back into the woods.  At the very least, I hope he (or she) is hoarse and has found a nice, soft boulder on which to sleep tonight.

If not, we’re prepared to fight back with a couple of pans and my karoke machine.

This a small corner of my office.  Obviously I haven’t accomplished much in the past 48 hours.  See that fiddle case?  Inside is a violin waiting to be tuned.  Next to it is a black bag filled with music.  The pile of clothes is topped by my Gold Diva Stillhouse Singer Birthday scarf.  I’m going to keep it near my music stand, as soon as I find space in this mess to set up the stand.

Last night I spent a couple of hours online, surfing youtube for new songs.  Yeah, I should have been cleaning so this morning I could have walked into an office that was ready to work in, but…

I’m going to give myself one more day.

p.s. Son #1 called last night.  Our ten-month-old grandson has taken his first steps, though at that moment he didn’t realize what he’d done.  Does that mean we’ll be chasing him around the house next month?

Or will there still be time for snuggling?