Show and Tell Friday this week wonders about our favorite room….
Our house was built in 1929. It is not particularly fancy, nor a remarkable example of bungalow architecture, but it is cozy and welcoming, and we loved it instantly. I love older houses — there is a lot to be said for newness, but not only do I prefer the older architecture, but I feel an enormous satisfaction from knowing that generations of families have grown up in a house, in the connection to history and time that come with an older house.
Our house was a rental for a long time before we bought it, and we got it for a song from the bank who had repossessed it, just before the real estate market soared. I have a kind of superstitious feeling about repossessed things, cars especially, but with houses it’s exactly the opposite. It was unloved, unlooked-after, abandoned really, and now somebody loves it. Each of the rooms has its own character and charm, but the sunroom holds a special place in my affection, as it is so far the first one we have "remodelled".
This room used to be a porch at the side of the house, a common feature in bungalows. At some point in the past — after the switch to drywall, is all we know — the porch was enclosed and the french doors moved to the new exterior wall.
At first, we used this room as a sunroom — which is what we still call it — with white-painted wicker furniture and a table covered with plants, since the western exposure makes it very bright on summer afternoons. (I had a lovely dream of looking out the windows onto roses planted along the edge of the driveway, but I’m afraid the tree-planting frenzy of the 1960s owner has made it far too shady for roses, and for the moment the only thing that lives there is trash cans. It’s on the list of Things to Change.) After our first baby started crawling, we put up a temporary gate from the dining room, as we worried that she would fall off the step onto the hard concrete floor and break her nose, and then because the gate was so hard to step over, we rarely used it. After Julia was born, we decided to make it into a playroom for the girls. We were getting a new roof and fixing serious termite and water damage at the same time, so this room was gutted and fitted out with new drywall, new double-paned windows and wiring, and I painted it, the stucco and trim a plain clear white and the drywall a lovely buttery yellow, Laura Ashley Pale Cowslip I.
David’s parents still had his desk knocking about in their basement, so we were happy to pass that along to our girls, with an inexpensive but fairly sturdy IKEA chair. A piece of blue plush carpet with a non-slip liner underneath makes the hard floor comfortable, and a pile of IKEA pillows can be tossed into the corner to clear the floor, or piled up to make a cozy reading spot. A small but fairly handsome laundry basket makes a handy spot for toys. It is intentionally rather spartan, both because the room itself is just too small for much furniture, and so that it is adaptable to whatever the girls want to do at a given moment. The window into the breakfast room makes a great puppet theater.
The transition from the formerly-exterior stucco and the drywall had always been an awkward one, and so when I saw this molding carved with climbing roses at a building-supply company, I knew it would do the job perfectly.
We dawdled rather a long time with curtains, but eventually the foot traffic from the apartment building next door proved too much, and we put these up. I sketched out a fairly simple bracket, and David cut and installed them, with one long rod that runs the length of what is essentially a wall of windows. I wanted curtains that would be easy to remove for washing, so the rod only rests on the bracket, and the rings are simple plastic ones from the crafts store, that are sewn onto panels of bleached muslin, and I just toss them in the laundry. The rings make it easy for the girls to open and close the curtains themselves.
It makes me happy.
