Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Elephant in the Room

Or, actually, the huge jaggedy stone fireplace set at a completely frustrating angle! Lately I've been getting a little... restless. I am starting to get the itch to do something more with our house. I guess it's my new blog obsession, Young House Love. Suddenly, I want our house to reflect more of us. I have a million art projects churning in my brain, which is a wonderful change of pace. I want more than photos on our walls. I want words and traditions and tokens of our story to reflect back at us the fun we have together and the love we have for each other. However.... BUZZ KILL:






















Ya. Well, that is also a buzzkill. But the real buzzkill is that we are going to have to sell our house in the next few years, for a variety of reasons (perhaps one of them is now this %$#^& fireplace)... and we are hoping and praying to break even (or run away really really fast and hope we blend in with all the other people up the creek without... a chance in heck of selling their houses). So... painting, buying accents and installing shelves and custom art? Not so exciting when we could be turning around and tearing it all down in a few months. So I guess I have to store all that inspiration in the back of my brain and address...

Mr. Buzzkill #2, alias... The Elephant Huge Rocky Fireplace in the Room.

Here is the annoying layout:
 Dress it up, you say? Buy some attractive looking fireplace tools and a couple of charming arm chairs in interesting patterns, perhaps? FAIL! I have a soon-to-be mobile, curious and quite sensitive boychild in the house. So the answer is not in the Embrace It category, but more in the Stack Things in Front of It category. So I did. I bought a huge, comfortable chair with ottoman, and moved Ben's toy box alongside, and now have this messy sort of "Oh! Gosh is that a huge fireplace back there?" type of arrangement now. Like when people tear up their carpet and realize that they have hardwood underneath. That kind of tone.
The chair is there in a light green, and the toybox in brown. And still you see the access point over there to the left of the chair. Ugh. Its really bothering me.

Anyway, we have been doing a ton of traveling and I have a lot of stuff to say on the subject of friends, teething and rude-things-people-say-to-moms in the blog cooker, but... this big, no corners in my living room problem was just weighing heavy on my mind. So glad its off my chest! Stay tuned.

5 comments:

  1. haha - the trick is to stop having such good taste :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've been reading a lot of design blogs since we bought our house, and you just haven't read back far enough in the Young House Love archives! Paint the fireplace either one shade darker or lighter than your paint - in my opinion, it'll blend in a LOT better that way. Here's the YHL article on painting their fireplace. (Here are some recommendations about rock fireplaces - it sounds like you should clean and primer it first. We've gotten Zinsser primer at Ace Hardware, if you want to get that brand.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Margo! I have thought about painting it but since we are selling slash leaving soon, AND since it still doesn't solve the child-safety-hazard problem, it doesn't seem worth the work, ya know?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yeah - it's frustrating to do a bunch of work so that someone else can enjoy it when you move out! And you're right about the safety hazard - I'm not sure what you could do about that. (Maybe instead of painting, you could just tape a bunch of styrofoam up - then it would be white AND soft!)

    ReplyDelete