A Mid Century Modern Dilemma

My interest in mid century modern design really started when I began looking for a our new house. I was drawn to low roofed ranches with avocado green kitchens, and if I had an unlimited supply of money to sink into one,  I am sure that I would the proud owner of a 1969 North Hills ranch. Instead I am the proud owner of a five year old West Cary faux craftsman track home.

One of the great things about our newish house is the complete lack of decoration. There are no built-ins, no crown moldings, no chair railings. The most decorative thing is the mantel, and Yankee has promised to rip that thing out for me (a story for another day, I'm sure). Most people would find this a negative, but for me it just makes it easier to get that MCM feel I'm looking for.

Another way to achieve the look I want has been to load up on some nice pieces of furniture. One thing I have been searching for is a make up vanity for my bathroom.  I found a really fabulous piece at Gremlina Vintage in Fuquay-Varina, but while I debated buying it, someone else snatched that baby up. So I was again on the search until I found a desk on Craigslist that I thought might do, and the best part was the price - $30.

Yankee and I drove to North Raleigh to pick it up. The seller was absolutely the most hipsterish dude I have ever had the good fortune to meet. He lived in a tiny little hundred year old cottage that he had been renovating for several years. In true hipster fashion, he did not appear to be making much headway, but I digress.  We paid the guy $30 bucks and drove off with this:

In the  Craigslist photo I could not see what made this piece the true treasure it is. What I saw in the photo was a desk with nice MCM lines and drawers on the right side like I wanted but which were surprisingly difficult to find. I figured I'd bring it home, paint it and have a great little vanity.  When I saw it in person though, this is what I saw:

It has charcoal and rose Boomerang Formica! This was a really popular pattern in the 1950's. It is really cool and in pretty good condition too. The yellow top and edging are not it great shape though.

My dilemma is - do I paint it? On the one had I absolutely hate when people Pinterst-up MCM furniture. I see it all the time on Etsy and Craigslist. They will have a beautiful Lane Acclaim piece painted with gray chalkboard paint advertised as "Shabby Chic." It is really painful to think that beautiful piece of furniture painted and called shabby. On the other hand, the piece is the perfect size and style for my bathroom, but not the perfect color.

My bathroom is painted a light blueish gray and there is a lot of white in it. There is absolutely no pink. The pink in the laminate is very pale though, so not too noticeable. The yellow part is pretty rough with some holes in the top and gouges in the trim.

Last night I decided I was definitely painting it, so I took the whole thing apart to prep it, but I did not do any painting. It just feels wrong. I am considering just painting the yellow parts and leaving the boomerang. Any thoughts and/or advice from my readers?

On the inside, they used left over laminate. Now this color would be perfect in my bathroom.

This leftover piece is exactly like the counter top in my parents bathroom when I was growing up. 

Could the shape of this support get more 50's? I think not!

The two legs on the right side are wood painted black with metal caps.

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.

These Floors Score

In the latest edition of my newsletter* there is an article about two trendy flooring options - stained concrete and cork. I have never seen cork floors, and it is a little difficult for me to imagine flooring made out of such a soft material.  It seems like a bold ( or crazy) decorating choice - similar to putting white carpet into a house in Georgia's red clay country. Stained concrete on the other hand, seems like a brilliantly practical choice.

Concrete floors can go with any decorating style.

With a talented contractor, you can make your floors look like just about anything you want. I have seen them look like wood, flagstone and tile. They can look traditional or ultra modern, and your color choices seem infinite. My brother and sister-in-law just bought a new house and one of the main deciding features were  concrete floors  in the entire house - even the bedrooms. Even with their three big, rambunctious dogs, they can have beautiful, but easy to maintain floors.

                                             Modern Flooring by Passaic Artists & Artisans Concrete Shop

My sister was far in front of the concrete floor trend when she had them done in the house she built nine years ago. I asked what her opinion on them was after having lived with them for so long, and she said for her family of  a husband, three kids, a cat and multiple dogs, it was a great choice. Her recommendation was to hire an experienced contractor to do the work, so that the finish will last for years to come. One thing I can say is that after almost a decade, her floors look as good to me as they did in the beginning, and they have held up style-wise too.

*My newsletter is really interesting with a few short articles (written by professionals who are not me) and other features like demographic information and local events for whatever part of the country you are in. If you would like to receive it, just send me your email address.

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.

Historical Housing Prices Put in Perspective

Realtor.com has compared the change in the price of housing to the change of prices of other necessary items* over the past thirty years in this snappy little graphic.




*Okay, Radio Shack Stock is not really a necessity. 

Fall is a Buyer's Season

Autumn. The days are cooler. The kids are back in school. It is a great time to walk through a corn maze,  to enjoy a pumpkin spice latte, and to buy a house. According to Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at realtor.com, buyers who are willing to close in the off-peak months of fall and winter may very well have the upper hand in negotiations.

As usual with economists, it all comes down to supply and demand.  He says that normally inventory peaks in August and begins to slow as the nights grow longer. But this year the typical seasonal decline will start a bit later. There will be more choices in September than any other month in 2015. On the demand side, now that school has started, fewer people are interested in moving, so the number of contracts decreases. This means the sellers have fewer offers, so buyers may be able to negotiate a better deal for themselves.

I can attest to this with the real life example of selling my house last year. Yankee and I had big plans of putting the house on the market in June. Quickly June turned into July and then August, and still we did not have to house ready to sell. We finally had a firm marketing date in the beginning of September, but the day before it was to go live on MLS, Yankee went under the house and found water dripping. Our dishwasher was leaking. It took another six weeks to get everything fixed, so it was October before the house was on the market.

By this time, the type of buyers looking for a 3500 square foot, five bedroom home had either bought already or were waiting until spring because the school year was well underway. When an offer finally came in after six weeks on the market, we had to take it seriously even though it was way off our target price. We needed to sell and with no other offers, we accepted a deal we would have scoffed at in July.  Our loss was the buyers' gain. They got a beautiful home (with a brand new dishwasher and kitchen floor as a bonus) for an excellent price.

So if you are on the fence about buying, right now may be the best time to climb off that fence and buy your new home. If that buying is going to be in the Triangle, I am more than happy to help find the perfect house for you and negotiate a great deal on it.

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.