Things to like about my house

I have been doing really at-home tourist-ing lately since it's too hot to go outside except when absolutely necessary. Specifically, I've been working on some of the large backlog of deferred maintenance on our house. In order to keep what I hope is my generally positive outlook on things, however, even when faced with the ugliness this deferral has caused, I decided to look around and catalog some of the things I like about our house.

And I found quite a lot of things, some in odd places. Like our bathroom floors (see above and on the right), whose vintage tiles I wasn't fond of for several years. But lately their retro-funky-charm has been growing on me. These tiles were no doubt the height of fashion in the '30's when they were laid down and they've certainly held up well.

I like the tile in our guest bathroom shower, too, which you can see at the left. What a nicely whimsical shape for the yellow tiles! It even echoes, a little bit, our city's most famous shape, the top of the chapel of the Alamo (which, however, as you can see here, hasn't always been there!).

One of the best things about our house are the floors. We had them refinished before we've moved in, in 1981, and except for a few high-traffic areas, they still look fantastic. I'm sure this is mostly due to the fairy dust skillful labor provided by our long-time cleaning lady, but our nice collection of oriental rugs (perhaps subjects of a future post) do set the wood grain off beautifully, we think.

There are other examples of nice woodwork elsewhere in the house, woefully un-maintained but occasionally still nice to look at. One of my favorite pieces is the newel post at the bottom of our stairs (please ignore need for painting and refinishing and focus on on the lovely grain of the ball, shown at the left).

Our stairway, in fact, is one of the very best things about the house. Having a two-story house allows you to keep the messiest stuff upstairs out of view of visitors, provides daily exercise [especially if you're forgetful and continually are having to go up and down looking for keys, cell phones, glasses of ice tea, etc.], and also makes a nice place to hang family photos and other artwork. On the right is a view up the stairs from the first floor and on the left is looking down them from the second:


And below is a shot I took sitting on them about half-way up, to show one of their nicest features, a skylight that was suggested by one of Henry's sisters when we were fixing up the house before we moved in (thanks, Z!). What a wonderful addition that is, making lights unnecessary during most of the days' trips up and down in search of the lost objects referred to above.

The family photo collage on view here includes one of our wedding photos, my grandparents' wedding picture, a candid shot of baby Henry with his grandparents and a lovely photo of his mother with her siblings and her mother—sitting on a bench that's now in his office.

Even though I don't spend much time outside the house these days, there are some things in our poor parched yard that I like, too. I'm particularly fond of the view from the second floor north windows, which our cedar elm trees make green and soothing, as you can see on the left. This is the view out the window of my study (formerly a kid's room) where I do most of my blogging under the protection of the good witch you can sort of see hanging there.

Another aspect of our house that has always been practical, but whose odd color has had to grow on us, is the stone with which the exterior is faced.

The house, as I mentioned before, was built a long time ago, back when 2 x 4's were actually 2" x 4", and the stones they used on the outsides of most of the homes around here are close to a foot thick. Which makes great insulation, keeping the houses relatively cool. At least it works this way when it gets below 80 at night and doesn't hit 100 every day! The photo on the right is of our outside wall where the base of the chimney makes an angle with the east side of the house.

Guess I'd better get back to my fixing up. If my efforts are successful, I might have some other items to add to the "like list" eventually.