Keep thinking white...

There's progress on the house front. The oil contamination is nearly eliminated (we had a leak; this is BAD news in building and environmental terms). Things have moved slowly but thankfully the process has worked and despite being surrounded by a moat, and having countless cubic metres of water flushed under our foundations, our old house is still standing. Every thing in this house needs something doing. There seems to be no area that is untouched by the ravages of time. Buy an old house: it's a money pit. This week, more excavations. Our kitchen is being relocated, so that a drain can be decommissioned and used as an oil-flushing route. All change is good change (isn't it?) so I am holding on to that! I laugh in the face of easy building projects. This one, it seems, is going to be epic with complications from start to finish. I can't in fact even imagine a finish. But meanwhile, I just keep pinning pictures of white interiors and hoping for the best! And...smile!!!

My husband warned me that I shouldn't 'fall out of love' with our house; he is in it for the long haul. I have not fallen out of love, but let's say that I am contemplating a break! It's hard to love your surroundings when they conspire against you. But it will all be worth it in the end and if nothing else, we are putting right a lot of wrong things, restoring and making good.

Meanwhile in other matters, I woke up this morning and decided that I should own a silk kimono. This prompted by Boo, who got one at the weekend. I live in constant awareness that one can't dress like ones teenage daughter (my new mantra in life) but she does sometimes pick something that I would never have considered. How nice to loll about the house in a kimono. This, I must do.

An interesting conversation with her last night about the Olsen sisters. She wondered how these teen actresses could have changed so much and why did they look 'so weird'? I eventually got to the bottom of what she meant; it was that their faces that had changed, either through surgery or from being too thin. A good discussion ensued about how being really thin can be really bad. I try to never write disparagingly here about other women; I think the Olsen sisters did once look lovely. But now - they do look kinda haunting. I think it was good that Boo could recognise the difference.

And so back to white-washed rooms, which are my place of mental sanctuary. I read about painting wooden floors with boat paint, as is the custom in Nantucket apparently. It gives a high-shine finish and gets better with age. This sounds lovely to me - if it doubt, paint it white. There is something so calming about the idea. Life-trodden boards. This may actually be a fanciful notion rather than sound reality (a bit like a kitchen table strewn with last night's wine bottles and this morning's jam pots - a nod to a bohemian lifestyle - which in effect can just look, well, messy). I am willing to give the boat paint a go - even though our architect thinks I am slightly nuts and I have not any concrete evidence that it works. But if they do it in Nantucket, then that must be good, right?

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Keep thinking white...

Reviewed by axiata
Published : 2014-06-17T05:55:00-07:00
Rating : 4.5