As I mentioned before, the front porch was enclosed sometime after 1913.  I really like the way the house looked without the glass enclosure but we certainly enjoy our enclosed front porch.  In the summer this is our main dining and entertaining space.  It is covered from the sun or rain.  There aren’t any nasty mosquitos or other flying things.  I close the windows and draw the drapes in the morning.  In the evening as it begins to cool down outside it is easy to open up the porch and cool it down pretty quickly.

The end that faces the driveway is the east side of the house.  The morning sun come in and it heats up pretty quickly.  To help eliminate that I looked for some nice outdoor curtains last year.  I ran into two problems.  How do you put up curtain rods on leaded glass windows that are in metal frames and how do I afford outdoor curtains.  I was shocked at how expensive they were!  My solution was Command hooks and shower curtains!

It works great to keep out the sun.  I was pretty set on painting the blue and green on the porch when we moved in but it is pretty low on the to do list so I decided to work with it instead of against it.  The blue and white  looked nice with the existing paint and I have decided to just embrace the nautical feel we seem to have going on.

We removed the chandeliers that were out on the porch.  They were pretty but we needed something with more light and some way of circulating the air.  We replaced them with these 72 inch fans that are controlled with a remote.  They certainly are not turn of the century fixtures but they do make the space more functional for us.  We packed up the chandeliers for now and plan to put them up in other parts of the house that currently have really bad 1960 flush mounted ceiling fixtures.

We have found we tend to all head out here for meals in the summer.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner are eaten here and the dining room table has mostly been used for folding laundry.  Youngest son spends most of his day out here.  He even brought out his hammock he got while on a mission trip to Guatemala  to try and put it up so he could sleep on the porch.  We might have to get a hammock stand.  He has the same problem I had with the curtains.  Hard to attach hooks on metal window frames or the solid block of the walls.

There were two old pews on the porch when we got here.  They were huge and ugly.  Matt gave away the larger one to someone he works with.  It was refurnished and looked beautiful.  Matt decided to keep the smaller one and do the same thing himself.  It came out great and adds some nice additional seating on the porch.

We are enjoying our “outdoor space.”  It is fun to look out at the park, watch all the people walk by and share a summertime supper or a cocktail with friends.

There have been a lot of little projects under way here and lots of discussion and research on some bigger ones.  I managed to find a place for all my antique store purchases.  The entryway looks very inviting with my botanical prints and a fun glass top bronze table I found.  I really like the way the metal on the table matches the gold leaf on the ceiling.  I am still hunting for some upholstered side chairs to complete this grouping.

I did find these chairs online and think they might work:

But then again, maybe I need something more vintage.  The entry is dark so I like the yellow and I recently got this fabric for the built in seat at the bottom of the staircase.

So I think the chairs would work with the yellow tinted walls, gold leaf ceiling, the botanical prints and this window seat.  I also added some family photographs to the top of the piano.  Oldest daughter said it would help make the house feel more like home to have some family pictures out.  I was surprised by this because I didn’t have pictures displayed at the old house.  I had a few in the master bedroom and upstairs hallway but nothing in what would be considered public places in our house.  I thought I would give it a try.  I had the pictures all printed in sepia and used clear frames.  I do like the way it looks.

I did find a place for my Willy’s advertising prints in the butlers pantry.

The other set of pictures I had picked up went in the dining room for now.  The buffet is dark and these lighten up that space a bit.  They probably won’t stay here forever but for now I like how it looks.

We were in our last house for 14 years and never got around to painting the master bedroom until we got ready to sell it.  I didn’t want to do that again here, especially since the  master is lavender!  I picked a blue gray and Matt started to repaint before we moved in.  Neither of us liked the color I picked and it read very green in the room.  I don’t know if it is because of the purple on the walls or the yellow art deco chandelier in the room.  (It is very pretty but I don’t like it and it isn’t original.  It is on my find a replacement list)

Many other things got moved to the front of our to do list and we are just getting back to painting the master again.  The kids all got new paint for their rooms, most of the first floor has been repainted and we used the intended blue/grey in the new third floor bathroom. It looks much nicer there.

So we went back to the drawing board for the master.  I decided the room is big.  There is a lot of white trim, white crown molding, tall white baseboards, the white closet and fireplace tile all are white.  My thought was go with a really dramatic and dark blue color.  I picked the color but we were undecided about the finish.  Matt has always wanted paint to be eggshell or semi gloss because it is easy to clean and we have kids and pets.  I didn’t like it at first but after 25 years of marriage it is what I am used to seeing on the walls now and I no longer like the way flat paint looks.  We tried two shades of the paint.  One in flat and one in gloss. You can still see the blue gray in the middle that looks green.

We agreed the darker paint looked better but the gloss showed all the imperfections in the plaster walls.  On 115 year old walls, there are a lot of imperfections.  So Matt has started painting the master in the darker color with a flat finish.  It is a tedious job with a lot of cutting in to do.  I am anxious to see how it looks when it is all done.

We left a house with two and a half baths to move to this house with five and a half baths.  Now that the master bath is finished, we are a family of six using, you guessed it… two and a half baths!  Oldest son and oldest daughter still don’t have heat in their bathrooms so they have been using the master.  Youngest daughter loves having a new shower that is bright and full of light so she has moved all her stuff into ours as well.  Her shower is dark and I used that one until ours was completed.She does have a point about it being difficult to shave your legs in hers.  Having access to the master from the hallway has made this a lot easier and doesn’t seem like such a strange feature anymore.

We still need to get heat into all three kids bathrooms on the second floor.  Youngest doesn’t have heat but her room and bathroom are small and her radiator is next to the bathroom door so the bathroom stays comfortable.  There isn’t heat in the kitchen or laundry room yet either.  Fortunately it has been a fairly mild Midwest winter and the propane heater in the kitchen has been adequate.  We had a few incidents with the laundry room being cold and water pipes/drains freezing on the washing machine and a newly installed fitting in the crawl space under the laundry room breaking.  These seem to be solved with the addition of a space heater with a thermostat placed in the laundry room. These are definitely issues we should address before next winter but it was a relief to get through this winter without any additional expenses on infrastructure.  Well, we almost made it through the winter.  The crazy wind last weekend blew some shingles off the roof and we need to address that problem!

My parents bought an old farmhouse and did a complete remodel when I was in middle school.  We didn’t have heat in that kitchen the first winter there but it must have been a much colder winter.  One night my sisters and I were doing the dishes (no dishwasher in that awful kitchen) and my younger sister was the dryer that night.  She stacked the Corelle dishes as she finished drying them.  When I picked them up to put them back in the cupboard, the whole stack slid off and they all shattered.  There was ice layered between each plate! All things considered, we have not been too inconvenienced by our whole heating adventure so far.

I started this post on Monday and titled it “Monday Morning Musings” but never got it posted so I had to change the title!  It is a lot longer than I intended.  Thanks for reading to the end.