Moving On Up

The United Van Lines' National Movers Study shows the migration patterns of Americans and this year North Carolina is the fifth most popular state to move to. This is no surprise since North Carolina - particularly The Research Triangle - offers the things people are looking for when they relocate such as economic opportunity, good weather, and outdoor recreation.

North Carolina is really pretty much perfectly situated globally. We have four complete seasons, but none of them are brutal.  As far as outdoor recreation, we have it all. On one end of the state we have beautiful beaches and on the other side there are mountains, and in between we have the best place I have ever lived - The Research Triangle Region.

Unique to this particular area of the state - and the most of the country really, is that the three corners of The Triangle are each anchored with a major research university. In Raleigh we have North Carolina State University with over 33,000 students, strong engineering programs and the state's vet school. 

Twenty-five miles to the west is Duke University, one of the country's top universities with a hospital ranked number 14 in the entire country by U.S. News & World Reports. And they have a fairly decent men's basketball team.

Nine miles south of Duke, in one of the most beautiful college towns ever, is The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  - ranked as the fifth best public university in the country.  It boasts a gorgeous, historical campus, its own hospital complex, and a great women's soccer team and men's basketball team. Plus there is one beautiful College Girl there who happens to be my daughter, so clearly this makes UNC the best of the three schools, but I digress.

I believe this triangle of top education is one of the reasons the Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill area is such a great place to live.  It attracts the kind of businesses that need well-educated workers and in turn provides high paying jobs. And because of the Duke and UNC hospitals, we have excellent health care.  The universities provide an abundance of activities ranging from the stunning Duke gardens, to music, theater and that wee college basketball rivalry we have going here.

The other side of the states-people-most-want-to-move-to coin, is the states-people-most-want-to-leave side. According to the Movers Study, that state is New Jersey* followed by New York, Illinois, Connecticut and Ohio.  The common thread seems to COLD.  So if you are looking to escape the cold or migrate for any other reason, I suggest the Research Triangle region of North Carolina.

*New Jersey is Hubby's home state. Number nine on the list of states-people-most-often-leave is my home state of Mississippi. We both hold a love in our hearts for our home states, but I think North Carolina is where we are meant to be.



















 

The Cary Real Estate Frenzy...

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.. has already begun.  Last year, the crazy Cary real estate market of multiple above asking price offers and homes selling before they even hit the market started in April. This year, it started last week. On Wednesday, my clients and I were the first people to tour a home that had just hit the market. Thursday morning I called the listing agent to ask a few questions only to find out that the house was under contract, sight unseen to an out of state buyer. Her words were - it went WAY over asking price.

Luckily, my clients weren't absolutely in love with it, so we set up a schedule of homes to see on Saturday.  Early Saturday morning, I got a message from the agent of one of those houses, saying they already had multiple offers, and were asking us to submit our highest and best offer by 5pm. It had been on the market less than 24 hours.

Something new popped up on the MLS Saturday night, so we scheduled a showing for noon on Sunday.  I got a call from the agent cancelling it because they already had two offers. Ugh. What's an agent to do?

The main issue is that while we have buyers chomping at the bit, there is very little for sale. Most people wait for spring to put their homes on the market, but if it is in the right LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION (Cary) and priced right, I suggest you give me a call today, so we can get it on the market and with a little tiny bit of luck, sold by Sunday. Of course, I cannot guarantee I can actually sell your house in a weekend, but if this buying frenzy holds up, it could happen.

Winter, Movies and Shoes. Oh My!

Winter hit the Triangle hard this week. It was twenty degrees when I left the house this morning which is not sleep in the carcass of a dead horse cold, but chilly all the same. And what better way to spend a cold winter night than at the movies?

Cary's First Flurries of 2016

When the Academy Award nominations came out, I was shocked to learn that I had seen four of the eight best picture nominees.  Because of one of my new favorite places, Frank's, I have become a semi-cinephile. Since I am already half way there, I am going to try to see all eight nominees.  And from the aforementioned horse carcass, the astute reader may have guessed my fifth Oscar potential was Revenant staring Mrs. Tom Brady's ex-beau, Leonardo DiCaprio

Revenant a great movie, but out of the seven movies I've seen over the past year it is not my top pick.

Here is my list so far:

7. Bridge of Spies - I would describe this movie as perfectly serviceable, like a pair of Dansko work clogs.  Well made, well acted and a good story, but it lacks pizzazz. Definitely watch at home material.  

They will save your feet.

6. Heart of the Sea - If we are going to stick with the shoe analogy, and why not, I am going to go with some sparkly spiked heeled Jessica Simpsons. The CGI is flashy and looks great, so it is definitely the kind of movie to go out for, but the quality of the story is lacking so it is not something that is going to last. (The Heart of the Sea is one of Yankee's favorite books, and he was very disappointed in the movie interpretation, so he puts this movie at a distant last. Having never read it, that was not an issue for me.)

Flashy and worth wearing - at least once.

5. The Martian -  Toms. Definitely Toms. They are fun, uber comfortable, and make your heart happy wearing them.  Matt Damon was lovable as always. The film makes you feel like humans have actually walked on mars and because of this I give it a 'Worth Going to the Theater' recommendation.

Oh so wearable

4. The Big Short - I am think a great pair of Kate Spades here. They seem very conservative and even a bit everyday, but they are really very fine, special shoes. I think in delivering the impossible, this movie went even beyond the whale in The Heart of the Sea and the bear mauling in Revenant. This movie made the financial meltdown entertaining and almost understandable. It was interesting, funny and frightening all at the same time. Plus Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt in the same movie? Worth the price of admission right there.

Simple. Timeless.

3. Revenant - Think Frye boots here. The attention to detail is unmatched in a movie/shoe that is readily available to the masses, and it has a longevity none of the other movies have.  In the same way that you can look fabulous wearing a pair of Campus boots from 1975, this movie will be watchable for decades to come. Even with a great story and high caliber acting, the true star of the film was without a doubt, the cinematography, and not just for the huge majestic mountain scenes, but also the stunning beauty and realism of the bear mauling. Because of this, Revenant is a must-see-on-the-big-screen film.

Just as beautiful and stylish as the day they were made 40 years ago.

2. Straight Outta Compton  - Converse All Stars have been around for almost a century and are very affordable and yet, when you see someone wearing them, you know that is a cool person. The same goes for the story of NWA - cool, very cool. This film successfully tells a very interesting story, with good writing, acting and music.  Sadly it had no chance of being nominated since the entertainment business is portrayed as, well, less than stellar.

Cool. Cool. Cool.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road - A fabulous, funky pair of Marc Jacobs. If you have not seen it, don't laugh at my number one pick. This movie has it all -  a strong story, almost non-stop action, and stunning cinematography. This is the kind of movie that movie theaters were made for. I saw it at the theater and recently watched it at home, and I like it so much I would probably watch it again.

They have it all - quality, beauty and pizzazz!

If I see any of the other nominees, I will be sure to let you know what its spirit shoe is.

It's a Holiday Wrap

It is eight pm on New Year's Day which to me means the holidays are officially over. Here is as rundown of the some of the highlights of our second Christmas in Cary:

• The most Cary-centric activity we did was the North Carolina Chinese Lantern Festival at the Koka Booth Amphitheater. It was pretty amazing. They build all of these displays out of lighted lanterns. The dragon was 186 feet long and sprayed water out of its nostrils to mimic steam. We lucked out to go on one of the few rain-free nights this December.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

•  My birthday is right before Christmas and Hubby gave me this sweet Mid Century Modern clock! 
  

• Comedian Son came from California and stayed a little over a week. I cannot really say he came home because as much as I love living in Cary, it will never be his home - it is just the place his parents and sister live. Georgia will always be home to him. 

• This is a photo of our beautiful Christmas tree. Please enjoy it because it is the last real tree we will ever have. We always had a fake tree until about four years ago when College Girl finally talked me into getting a real one. It was fine when we lived in the other house, but it was terrible in this house. The difference being hardwood floors. A reasonable person would think the hardwood/real tree combo would be better than having pine needles stuck in carpet, and that certainly is a benefit. The problem we had was ornaments falling to their deaths. I figure with a fake tree I can secure the ornaments better. Plus there is the lack of sneezing and hives too.

    

• Generally we spend our New Years Eves sitting at home, but this year we ventured out to see The Book of Mormon at the Durham Performing Arts Center. This was our first play since moving to the Triangle. It was very different than going to the Fox Theater in Atlanta. The Fox is an old movie theater and it is stunningly beautiful with an Arabian Nights theme including stars painted on the ceiling, but that old beauty comes a steep price or rather very steep steps with a serious lack of handrails. The seats are sized for 1920's sized butts, so a little tight for today's theater patrons. The DPAC is shiny and new, with comfy seats and safe stairs. As for the play, I enjoyed it but would not recommend it to anyone who is easily offended by ANYTHING AT ALL, because it is super offensive.  

So it was a great holiday, but I am ready to get on to the day to day living of 2016. I hope you had a great holiday too, and I wish you a very happy new year.

It's ADOREable

I was meeting a friend at La Farm -  a tasty local bakery and restaurant - for lunch the other day. A few doors down from the restaurant is the Cary location of ADORE Designer Resale Boutique. I  always planned to check it out, but usually I am either running late for lunch or late for whatever I have going on after lunch or (and this is the most likely scenario) late for both, so I have never had the chance, but on this day I was a whopping 30 minutes early so check it out I did.

ADORE Resale Boutique

Now I have talked about my thrifting addiction before. Rarely does a week go by that I am not in a thrift store somewhere in the Triangle, looking for the perfect pair of old lady shoes or mid-century modern something, but shopping at ADORE should in NO WAY be confused with shopping at Goodwill. It is more on par with a high-end designer boutique. The biggest differences are there is way more stock than in a true boutique; much, but not all, of that stock has been worn before; and the prices are slightly less jaw-droppingly high. Slightly.

The shop itself is really attractive with nice displays through-out, and the equally attractive saleswomen was very friendly and helpful. And oh, the beautiful things they had. Jimmy Choo, Channel, Michael Kors. About the lowest end items I saw were a few pairs of Talbot shoes and an Ann Taylor skirt. Like I said before, not everything was used. I'd say maybe as much as 20% of the items still had the original tags on them.

Yankee swears that I can walk into any store and instantly hone in on the most expensive item there. I say it has more to do with good taste than actual dollar amount. It was either naturally inherited or nurtured into me by my parents. Either way, it happened in the form of a St. John red coat with faux fur trim dyed to match, except one touch  let me know the fur was not faux at all. The sales lady said it was beaver. I did not even bother to price it, since I knew it would be way out of my range and even if I could afford it, I would have to keep it hidden from Daughter and her vegetarian ways.

My fabulously fashionable gloves

Instead, I settled for a beautiful double breasted red wool gabardine coat and the most fabulous gloves ever. They are vintage black kid leather with white kid trim hand stitched inside. You can wear them up for a classic black glove look or  you can fold them over to show the white part if you are in a super-cool mood. The leather is so soft, just touching them is a joy. Though they are probably at least twenty years old, they had never been worn and still had the little hand written price tag and size tag on the inside.  My guess is no one could fit into them. I have surprisingly tiny hands and there were snug on me, but I bought them anyway, figuring they'll stretch a little over time.

Adorable red coat.

Overall, I rate ADORE fabulous, and I'll try to plan a little extra time to stop by whenever I have a La Farm lunch date. It will never take the place of my first love of digging around in the shelves and racks of a true thrift store though.

My Thrift Store/Craigslist Problem

When I look at something - particularly something that falls into the category of houses or furniture - I rarely see what is actually there. Instead I see what it could be. I definitely inherited this curse talent from my parents.

One of my earliest memories was looking at a house that my parents bought when I was about four. It stuck with me because the upstairs was still charred from a house fire. It takes some real vision to buy a burned house, but they did it. They restored the unburned downstairs to it's 1910 Georgian splendor, and created a fabulous mid-century mod kids space (complete with yellow paneling and green carpet) out of the burned carcass of the upstairs.

My parent's biggest project - other than raising five kids that is!

 My projects are on a much less ambitious scale than that, but I almost always have something in the garage that needs sanding or painting. I must admit that I spend way more time finding pieces to work on than I do actually working on them. I am a regular visitor of the Triangle's many thrift stores, and every night I'm cruising Craigslist looking for cheap mid-century pieces that just needs a little love.

I thought I might share some of my latest acquisitions/projects over the next few weeks. I will start with the bamboo etagere* I found on Craigslist for $20.

Clearly my new shelf had been used to store paint cans at one point in it's life

Bunches of other projects in the background. Sigh.

I should have taken a video of how wobbly it was when I got it. Quite a bit of wood glue and some small nails helped me sturdy it up. I wanted to keep the antiqued yellow finish, but there was so much discoloration that I had to paint it, trying to get as close to the original color as possible, then I took a paint brush with some stain on it and flicked it to give it those random spots it originally had. The little corner pieces were in good shape, so I left them as is. After everything dried, I sealed the whole piece with an oil based, satin finished polyurethane.

Now the holder of many things including some Daughter made art.

It's sitting in front of my kitchen window with my colored glass bottles and the mint-condition early '70's green goblets I got at the Durham Rescue Mission Thrift Shop. It brings back memories of that yellow paneled and green carpeted playroom I spent my childhood in.

Green and yellow. A perfect color combo.

*Fancy new word I learned from endless hours of shopping for open shelves on Craigslist.

The Royal Shower

In the two weeks since I last posted, we have done more unpacking, but sadly there are still so many boxes left to go. The good news though is our first major project in the house is done.

This house has many really great features such as a very good floor plan, large bedrooms and ginormous closets. It also has some pretty bad design choices such as putting granite counter tops in the kitchen with vinyl flooring. Seriously?!

Another questionable decision was in the master bath. It is very large with lots of natural light, an eight foot long vanity and a large linen closet - all good. Now for the bad - a two foot by two foot prefab shower. And when I say it is four square feet, that is the outside dimension. The space where you actually do your showering was even tinier. There was also a small garden tub that had a bad case of the uglies and that vinyl floor I mentioned in the kitchen? It was in the bathroom too. Yay!

 

I took videos of the house for Yankee when I looked at it the first time. I just watched the one from the bathroom, and the first comments I made was "that shower has got to go." I am happy to say it is gone and has been been replaced by a beautiful, roomy tile shower.

Because I have not taken a bath since I was nine years old (sitting in bathwater grosses me out), I see a bathtub as a floor space hog that must be kept clean, so I had my contractor, Jack Misnick, rip that baby out and make us a nice big shower. He and his people build me the most fabulous shower I have ever set foot in. Okay, I may be a little biased, but it is pretty great.

One of my favorite parts of the shower - the floor - almost did not happen. Well of course there was always going to be a floor since I have not mastered the art of showering whilst floating, but the floor was not going to look like it does now. I was determined to have marble tile on the floor, and I am sure that would have been beautiful, but it was soooo expensive.  Thankfully Krysta at Florida Tile came to the rescue and picked out the tile I have now. There is some marble in there along with blue, green and grey glass. It was a third of the cost, and I believe way more interesting than a plan marble floor would be. 

I had a pretty great shower in my Georgia house. It was one of those things about that house that I did not realize how nice it was until I moved to the rental. The rental shower had nice tile work, but it had a prefab pan for the floor that I really hated and the worse part was that it had no shaving ledge. I used one of those little plastic step stools which I was really happy to toss when we moved out. My new shower has a marble ledge that fits my entire foot, so I can shave away. 

Stepping into this tile and glass masterpiece is like stepping out of my real life and into some luxurious world that I am normally not part of. Sure I may have just come in from pulling weeds or scrubbing toilets, but while I am in this shower I feel like I am the Queen of Northwest Cary.

A Cook's Paradise

I grew up in a small town in Mississippi. Some of my family and friends still live there and for the most part they love their home, but there is one complaint I hear over and over from them - the lack of a decent grocery store.

They have basically three choices: A poorly stocked Kroger; the Walmart Super Center; and a small grocery store called Sunflower. If you are lucky enough to be active duty or retired military you can also shop at the air force base commissary. And that's it. This is a really big issue for the fabulous cooks living there like my mom, Sister III,  Brother-in-Law, BFF and her her youngest child.

One day BFF was complaining she could not find shallots anywhere in Small Town Mississippi . In my continuing effort to get her to uproot her family and move up here, I pointed out that the only problem you would have in Cary is choosing between multitude of grocery stores from which to procure your shallots.

She could pick up her shallots at one of North Carolina's own Harris Teeter's. If she wanted organic shallots she could try Whole Foods, Trader Joe's or Earth Fare. For a friendly shallot, she could go to the brand new Publix. I have never been Lowe's Supermarkets or Food Lion, but I bet they have shallots too. I'm not sure if there are Indian, Asian or Hispanic shallots, but if there are, she can pick them up at one of our many specialty grocery stores.
 
So here I am in Cary with at least ten different shallot buying opportunities, and would like to know how many times I have actually bought shallots or anything more difficult to find than organic milk? None. Zip. Zero. Why? Well it is a two fold answer. First and most importantly, I hate to cook. Absolutely loath it. People tell me it's a shame because I am a pretty good cook (I learned from the best - my mom).

The second answer is that I hate going to the grocery store even worse than cooking. No matter how spectacular they are, and let me tell you, we have the most fabulous grocery stores I have ever been in, I just hate going. Luckily for me, Yankee does not mind going at all. He says it reminds him of shopping with his dad when he was a kid, so he does pretty much all the food shopping (that's what he calls it) around here.

It is sad that I have an abundance of food choices and yet do not take advantage of them at all, while the great cooks from home have almost no choice at all. I guess they are just all move up to Cary AKA Cook's Paradise.

Painter's Block

When we bought our first house, we were coming from living in those bastions of  builder's beige walls - apartments and military housing. I could hardly wait to put color onto my new walls. I had  the paint picked out before we even moved in. I painted our dining room midnight blue, the living room forest green, and our bedroom burgundy. Trust me, in the early nineties this was the palette.

We moved to our second house in 1999, and I took a break from all that partying to paint my foyer eggplant and my dining room chili pepper. The family room was spring green and the sunroom had yellow walls and a blue ceiling. There was not a wall in that house that I did not make colorful. I was very sad to paint everything the same color when we put it up for sale.

We closed on our new house last Monday. One of things I so looked forward to about moving out of the rental was getting away from the taupe that covers every single wall. The New House has off white walls which is a nice, blank canvas to work with.

Here is the surprising thing - I just cannot get started. I have taken a tree's worth of paint samples from Lowe's and Home Depot. They are taped all over the house, but I have not been able to make a decision. I have owned this house for a week now and have not bought a single gallon of paint.

I clearly have painter's block. As a writer, I know how hard writer's block is to overcome. The only real cure for it is to write which does not really make sense, but it does work. I just sit down and start typing out anything that comes to mind. I often have to resort to writing blah, blah, blah when I am really stuck. Then I come back to that part later and replace the blahs with real words.

I think this what I am going to have to do in the new house. I want to paint my sewing room first because I am very anxious to get it set up, but since I cannot choose between the multitude of color samples taped on the wall, I am going to pick out a nice creamy white and just paint. If you know me, you know how bizarre this is. I have never willingly painted a wall white in my life, but I am pretty sure it is the only way to get my color flow back. The white will be my painter's version of blah, blah, blah. Hopefully I will be able to come back later with a real color.