Realtor Listing Images v. Real Living: the Dining Room

With so many people spending so much more time at home, due to the countless closures and restrictions that have occurred in the wake of the Covid-19 virus, there has never been a time when the "Theology of Home" mindset--the idea of making your home a true Domestic Church, an oasis of peace and tranquility for you and your loved ones--has been more essential (IMHO). No matter what storms are brewing outside your doors, inside your house, you can create a comforting and beautiful atmosphere that is like a foretaste of what awaits us after we leave this imperfect world and go to our eternal home to be with our Lord.

I have always been such an inveterate homebody that the quarantine life (not that we have been living that life as strictly as some) comes somewhat naturally to me!  I've always been happiest at home, with my family gathered about me. If I had to pick one place to spend my time during this earthly life, that would be it. Home. Not Paris.  Not Rome (that's right, not even my beloved Rome!).  Just HOME.

I have always been a nester, too, never happier than when feathering my own little corner of the world.  And we didn't always have the most impressive of nests, either: during our married life we've lived in two different tiny apartments in TX, a modest base housing duplex in TX, a 3-bedroom ranch house in FL purchased with a VA loan, a 1,000-sq. ft. rented ranch house in IL, another slightly bigger rented Cape Cod house in NH; and then finally, we bought what we figured would be our "forever home" in NH, a 4-bedroom Colonial that sat on a bucolic wooded lot more than an acre in size, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac street.  With five Catholic school tuitions to pay and five large and growing boys to feed, we didn’t always have a big home improvement budget, so we put a lot of DIY sweat equity into that house (a foreclosure bargain for us, because it was not quite finished off when the builder went bankrupt and it sat unoccupied for two years) over the course of the 26 years we lived there.  And it became  perfect for us, a home we thought we wouldn't ever want to leave: not only was it a spacious, solidly-built, lovely house in an idyllic setting, but it was our home base, our true north—most importantly because it was filled with memories of raising our boys. We moved in when the oldest of our five sons was half-way through first grade, and it was the only home our youngest ever knew.  We imagined how well it would fit all the grandkids we would someday have when they came to visit us there.

But the funny thing is, before we owned that beloved Colonial, every other place we ever lived was every bit as much "home" to me, an oasis of peace and a source of joy.  Home really isn't a place; it's a feeling.  And I got that desired feeling of utter contentment and “belonging” every time I walked into the door of any apartment or house where my people lived, no matter how humble it might be. 

When all of our boys grew up, graduated from college, and started establishing themselves far from NH, we spent most of our time on the road visiting them, and every time we pulled into our driveway we would ask ourselves, "Why do we even have this house?"  We were never there anymore!

When it became clear that three of our five boys were going to stay settled not far from each other in VA, we decided to make the move to live closer to them and our growing brood of grandchildren.  So in late 2016/ early 2017, we started looking at listings that would put us as equidistant to all of our VA peeps as possible.  And one listing kept drawing my eye back, not matter how many I looked at--even though it was just one of those quickly-built, pre-fab houses in one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods where every other house looks practically identical to the one two doors down.  It wasn’t a one-of-a-kind treasure, by any means; but this sweet house just looked RIGHT for us.  When we finally took a trip down to walk through it in person, we only looked at this house and one other, and that's all it took: my mind was made up (and my husband was happy with it as long as I was; he's pretty awesome that way).

Our cozy cottage is not as large or well-built as our old house.  The yard is the size of a postage stamp.  But I have grown to love this house so much--and when I think of home, I no longer pine for that Colonial in NH. I think of this darling white-picket-fence house in a quaint little VA town, which became ours in the spring of 2017 and which has become my home in every way that's important.  (And now all four married sons live in the area, and all 16-going-on-17 grandkids!  And this is the house they think of as "Papa and Grammy's house," so how can I not love it?)

If you've come here often over the years, you might know that I am a big fan of having a dining room for special holiday meals, even if it isn't used all the time.  Our dining room in NH was almost ridiculously oversized, and it was one of my favorite things about that house.  If this VA house hadn't had one, I don't think we would have bought it; there is a roomy breakfast nook area off the kitchen, but fortunately, there is also my must-have formal dining room.  In the listing, this room was set up in a very minimalist way (probably staged for selling).  With so little furniture to distract the eye, the beauty of that gray-painted tray ceiling really stood out.

I have a lot of dining room furniture--I mean, really...A LOT.  But I hoped I'd be able to squeeze it into this room.  One glass-fronted china cabinet was repurposed to showcase my porcelain doll collection and has a spot in our new master bedroom.  But I was able to fit the rest of my pieces--including the antique oak dining table and chairs, with a matching sideboard, that my mom passed on to me when she and my dad downsized many years ago.  There isn't as much room to walk around the table as there was in NH, but we have made it work for us here!

I guess my decorating style would not be considered minimalist [insert laughing face emoji here!].

In our old dining room the antique oak sideboard served as a bar.  One thing I really appreciate about this new house is the little bar area (kind of a mini butler's pantry) between the kitchen and dining room, right around the corner from the sideboard.  (The kitchen in this new house, in fact, is wonderful; it's bigger and has lots more storage and work space than our old kitchen had--but that's a topic for another installment of Realtor Listing Images v. Real Living.)

Over the years, I've often wondered what kind of blog I have.  I'm not an Internet "influencer" when it comes to any of the usual topics--Faith, fashion, home decor, parenting...I just write about this and that, when the spirit moves me.  For some reason, all this Covid stuff is making me focus even more than usual on my home, and I want to write about how blessed I feel to have one that I love so much.  But as I said, that's been pretty much the case no matter where we've lived.  As long as I have my familiar things about me, and my husband by my side, I could live just about anywhere.

That's all for now.  But I do have the real estate listing pictures from the other rooms in our VA house, and maybe I'll be back to show you how different (and more cluttered!)  this place looks, now that it's set up for real living and not for show!    

Reflections on "Theology of Home" (#1)

Not too long ago, I spent the day taking care of my middle son's three little ones (G-Man-5, Princesa-3, and Rosita-almost 2), while my daughter-in-law Preciosa showed some houses to a prospective real estate client.  I don't ever expect any sort of official "thank you" for helping out in this way, because the very reason my husband and I moved down to VA just over two and 1/2 years ago was so that we could see our four oldest married sons and their families--who by some miracle had all migrated to and settled in the same area of the country!--on a regular basis and offer support and help when needed.  But Preciosa gave me the most thoughtful gift after my day with her darling offspring: a copy of Theology of Home, a beautiful book with the subtitle "Finding the Eternal in the Everyday."

To say that I love this book is putting it mildly.  I started to read it a few days ago and decided that I'd like to devote a series of blog posts to it (thus the addition of the "#1" in the title of this post!).  This eye-pleasing hardcover coffee table book deals with a subject that is near and dear to my heart: HOMEMAKING, in the truest sense of the word.  Being a homemaker is a vocation I take very seriously; after marriage and motherhood, I feel it is the most important work I do in my life here on earth.  As the "heart of the home" (a title that I believe belongs to all mothers, everywhere, whether they work inside or outside the home), I long to create a sanctuary for my family.  Because as authors Carrie Gress, Noelle Mering, and Megan Schrieber say in the introduction to Theology of Home, "Home is that place where we are meant to be safe, nurtured, known for who we are, and able to live and love freely."

"Ironically," the authors also say, "despite the innate human desire that there is for home, the notion that someone would actually want to make a home, providing a place of safety, love, order, education, and hospitality, has fallen out of favor.  Could there be, in the minds of millions of women today, anything worse than being a 'homemaker'?  The pendulum, however, seems to be swinging back toward home even if the homemaker title is still unpopular."

Personally, I don't care if the term is unpopular.  I am actually proud to call myself a wife, a mother, and a homemaker.  (Homemaker is a title that much more accurately describes the role of a woman who works primarily inside the home than the term "housewife," which really must be unpopular these days!)

My husband and I will celebrate our 39th wedding anniversary this December.  We are more financially capable of home improvements now than we were in the early years of our marriage. To say that we didn't always have the means to have the newest and the best of everything, when it came to the homes we lived in and the kind of furnishings and finishes found within them, is an understatement.  Back when our boys were little, our priorities were keeping them healthy and well-fed and paying their Catholic school tuitions; home improvements were usually put on the back burner until we could afford them.  So my home might not have always been ready for its HGTV close-up; but even during those times when we were on a shoestring budget, I always tried to make it as warm and cozy and comfortable as it could possibly be. I also wanted it to be pretty--a kind of foretaste of Heaven, a dwelling place that might ultimately help to steer the beloved members of my family to the Father's House, their eternal home.

Luckily, my husband learned over the years to be an outstanding handyman, tackling every sort of building, plumbing, and electrical project imaginable, and I have always been game for wall painting, picture hanging, and furniture refinishing.  We did our best to make every home we lived in feel uniquely "ours," even if it was just a rental.  We started out in a small apartment in Corpus Christi, TX; next, we moved into Navy base housing in Beeville, TX, and at the end of our time there, we became parents when we welcomed our first son; from there, we moved to Jacksonville, FL, where we bought our first home, a ranch-style house, and welcomed three more little boys; after my husband switched careers from Naval to commercial airline pilot, we lived for less than two years in a 1,100 sq ft house in the Chicago suburbs; next we moved to a rental home in Dover, NH; and after just a year there, we bought our "forever" home in that same town, a big Colonial on a quiet, wooded cul-de-sac street, where we lived for 26 years, welcomed a fifth baby boy, and raised our family.  In every one of those settings, I was a SAHM and homemaker, working tirelessly to make my family feel safe, comfortable, and happy within the walls of our home.

Eventually, when our boys grew up, moved out, and moved away, the NH house didn't make as much sense anymore.  We were constantly on the road, traveling to visit them and their growing families.  So we made the somewhat painful decision to sell that house (the one into which we'd poured so much sweat equity over the years, the one we thought we'd never leave), and we moved south to be near all of them.  I wasn't sure if our new, smaller house--located on a postage stamp-sized lot, in a cookie-cutter VA neighborhood--would ever truly feel like home.  But not quite three years in, I can happily say that this new house is indeed our HOME now.  A house is not a home if your people are never in it--and ours sure spend a lot of time in this one!

My husband is busy working on a project that will really make this new house work even better for our ever-growing brood of grandchildren (15 and counting!!), who come to visit here often.  He is currently finishing off the basement, so that we will have a huge, kid-safe play area (as well as another guest bedroom and bath).

I help him any way I can, but let's be honest--he does most of the work!  However, I am always busy myself at the task of homemaking, looking for ways to make this VA house of ours attractive, welcoming, and grandchild-friendly.

I love this G.K. Chesterton quote in Theology of Home: "There are two ways of getting home.  One of them is to stay there.  The other is to walk around the whole world till we come back to the same place."  Which one are you?  The homebody who never wants to leave, like me?  Or the world traveler who loves change and adventure, but breathes a sigh of relief when you finally return and walk through the door of your own house?

Discuss amongst yourselves!  I'll just be in my living room, staring at those canvas images of my grandchildren there on the wall...sighing with contentment because I'm home sweet home.

Suzy Homemaker at Heart

My daughters-in-law, who are all in the thick of raising young children, toddlers, and babies, make comments from time to time about how immaculate my little house (a.k.a. my empty nest where no offspring live anymore) here in VA usually looks.  The toilets sparkle!  It smells good (as in, it doesn't smell like dirty diapers)!  There is little-to-no clutter (because we decluttered like nobody's business when we sold our house--filled with 26 years' worth of raising our boys--in NH two years ago).

Sometimes it makes me feel a little embarrassed--like it's possible that I spend too much time cleaning when I should be doing more important things.

But I have ALWAYS been a neatnik, even as a little girl.  (Even as a teenager!)  From the time I was about eight, I always had my own bedroom.  In our family, there was an older brother, then me, then a younger brother, and finally two younger sisters close in age.  So it just happened to work out that the boys shared a room, the "little" girls shared a room, and I had my own--at least until I left for college.  This was probably the best arrangement I could have asked for, because I craved order, and my two little sisters most certainly did not.  It was natural for me to keep my clothes folded and put away in drawers, or hung up in the closet, rather than strewn about the floor.  My bed was usually made, and the books and knickknacks on my built-in shelves were carefully arranged.  I thought of my bedroom as my own little "apartment," where I could escape to read or listen to 45's on my portable record player in peace.  (It was an introvert's paradise!)  My parents used to use me as an example for my brothers and sisters, much to my dismay--"Why can't you make your beds, like Laura does?"--but the truth is that I didn't do it to earn any brownie points with them; I did it because I loved having a neat and orderly hideaway of my own.

I also learned to bake as a young girl, because I definitely had a sweet tooth but my parents couldn't afford to stock the pantry with store-bought goodies, snacks, and desserts.  However, there was usually a box of Bisquik on hand for making pancakes, and some basic staples like sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, eggs, and margarine.  And thus, my lifelong love of making coffee cakes--and baking in general--was born.  (I even tried homemade doughnuts once, and they were delectable!)  It was part of my weekend routine for a number of years, starting at about the age of 10, to make Tollhouse cookies (my dad's favorite) as a special treat for my family every Saturday.

So as you can see, I was a regular Suzy Homemaker by nature.  (Does anyone even get that reference anymore?)

Aside from being a wife and mommy (the only jobs I ever really wanted), I dreamed of having a home of my own to take care of one day.  I couldn't wait to fix up and decorate my own little house, to bake in its kitchen, even to clean it.  (Yes, that's my shameful secret: I actually like to clean!)

Of course, when I had four boys in four years (followed by a fifth son who came along five years after son #4), I had to relax my standards or I would have lost my mind.  My house was not as clean and tidy back in those days that my boys were morphing into men, to say the least!  I learned to deal with cluttered tables (with half-full drinking cups and crumpled wrappers left behind on every available surface), clothes left on the floor, jock straps and smelly socks discarded in the most unfitting places, unsightly splatters around the toilets...well, you get the idea!  I often went to bed with dirty dishes in the sink, knowing I'd have more energy to deal with them in the morning.  My cleaning philosophy could be described as "crisis management": whichever thing needed tending to most at the moment got done; but that meant that the house was seldom clean everywhere at the same time.  I never had a cleaning lady (because as I explained, I don't mind cleaning at all, and I wasn't going to pay someone else to do it).  "Best at hiding dirt" was my criteria for picking carpet and flooring in our house, so it could look clean even when it wasn't.  If I didn't have time to deep-scrub a bathroom that needed it, a quick wipe-down with baby wipes or Clorox wipes made things look presentable.  And here's my guilty little secret: I LOVE to vacuum (my husband likes to call me the "mad vacker").  I guess I'm just hard-wired to enjoy the most mundane of household chores.

But there is so much less to do now, housework-wise, than there was when our boys were living with us.  Here are some panoramic pictures my sister took of the first floor of our VA house, when she was here for a short visit in March.

As you can see, this is a house where, unless the grandkids are visiting, there's a place for everything and everything is in its place.  It helps that we have so much less stuff now than we did after we'd been living in our old NH house for more than a quarter of a century.  I'm hardly a minimalist, but my husband and I are definitely living more simply in our new VA digs.

I never had a hall linen closet as neat and orderly and filled with soft, pretty sheets and towels as I do now.  (Marie Kondo would even approve, methinks!)

I wish I'd taken a photo of our old linen closet in NH before we moved.  It was overfull and disorganized, and most of the towels in it were threadbare and dingy.  I gave up on colored towels when my boys became teenagers; their Clearasil would leave bleached-out spots on them, so I switched to off-white for all of our family's towels...and by the time we finally sold that house in NH, none of those crusty old things were worth hanging onto.  To stage our house for selling, we got fluffy new towels--pretty ones!  And then when we moved into our new house, we bought some more, so that when we ever do have guests we have nice towels to offer them.  So here's what my linen closet looks like these days.  (Like something out of Good Housekeeping, practically!)

It really is kind of fun, after all the years of child-rearing and cleaning up after a passel of messy boys, to have a neat house most of the time.  I can't deny it.  It is very bittersweet to have your kids grow up and leave you; but the sweet part is that there isn't as much housework to do, because there aren't as many messes.  I'm actually enjoying living in a house that I can keep as neat and orderly as my heart desires.  It is one of the best benefits of having an empty nest (aside from the much smaller grocery bills and laundry piles!).

It would be sad if my husband and I were alone in our neat little house all the time, though; luckily, 14 young children are often here, with their precious sticky hands, running around like whirling dervishes and leaving trails of animal crackers in their wake.  They're keeping it real for Grammy, reminding her that a house is for living, and living can be very messy!

So girls, sweet daughters-in-law of mine, don't think this is what my house always looked like!  Believe it or not, I once lived in a house with toys and clothes all over the floor, overflowing laundry baskets, piles of junk mail and dinosaur drawings on every counter, dirty diapers spilling out of the garbage can, etc.  I didn't always live like I do now!  You, too, will be amazed at how much easier it is to take care of a home that only has two grown-up people living in it.

But you will miss the chaos sometimes, as I do.  So thanks for bringing your wee ones over frequently to remind me of how wonderful that season of life truly is!

DIY Project: Mantel Decor

Recently, I have been thinking about painting our fireplace surround and mantel dark green or Kelly green.

The living room in our VA house is a soft sage green, and we have an accent wall in our breakfast nook that is Irish green (the actual color listed on the paint can is "Emerald Isle"!  Love it!).  These rooms were already painted these colors by the previous owners, and I definitely didn't want to change what they'd done.  I just love, love green!

It's not that our family room mantel isn't pretty with its golden oak finish...but I think I've been watching too much HGTV lately, and so I've been hankering to find a DIY project of some kind to tackle.

Ultimately, after some careful consideration, I didn't have the guts to pull the trigger...YET!  So instead I went to JoAnn's and bought some wooden letters for $1 apiece, stained them, and attached them with picture hanging putty so they won't be permanent and I can remove them if I come to my senses.

You might have guessed that those are the initials of my husband's and my first names.  (I already have a large wooden "P" on the wall in this room, or perhaps I would have done a "couples monogram" and put one of those in that middle rectangle instead of the ampersand--and yes, Laura learned a new word.)

When my #2 son (a big-time teaser from way back) saw what I'd done here, he told his wife that if she loved him, she would put his initials on their fireplace.  LOL!

Obviously, this is not a home décor blog.  And obviously, I am not a professional home decorator.  But I do kind of like the way these inexpensive embellishments make our fireplace--and our home-- really feel like it's "ours" (his & mine), two years in.

After the letter embellishments were added, I decided that perhaps it was time to figure out how to make all those unattractive black electrical cords hanging down the sides look a little less--how do I put this?--unattractive.

It's funny, those cords haven't really bothered me in the two years we've been living here.  And I do like having our ginormous flat-screen mounted over the fireplace, cords notwithstanding.  A nice painting would have looked more HGTV-ish, perhaps; but the new house has a very open floor plan and my husband thought it would be great to be able to see the TV from the nearby kitchen and eating area as well as the family room.  (This is a nice feature, I must admit.  I can keep watching whatever Netflix show which we happen to be binge-watching at the moment when I stand at the sink washing dishes.  We also have an excellent view of the TV from the kitchen table in the breakfast nook.)

But those ugly cords!

About a week ago, I just happened to see a picture of fabric electrical cord covers posted on a home decorating Instagram account I follow, and that led me to Google them.  And sure enough, I found just what I was looking for on Amazon.  The ones I ordered have Velcro closures all the way down their entire length, so if you need to get at your cords it's easy to remove and reattach them.  Perfecto!

Although truly, are the burlap scrunchies really any better-looking than the cords?  You be the judge.

If you like the idea of covering your unsightly electrical cords in fabric scrunchies but never thought of doing so before you stumbled upon this blog post, well then you're welcome.  :)

Bye for now!  (Posts about the Rome trip are in the works.  Stay tuned...)

From Our House to Yours

I just realized that title sounds like a Christmas card greeting.  But no, I'm not here to reveal our 2018 Pearl family Christmas card.  I'm not even sure I'm going to get one of those out this year. (Although as my husband likes to remind me, I've been saying that every year for about 10 years now, and it always seems to get done eventually.  I can't seem to give it up!)

What's actually going on here is that I was just admiring the view from our front hall this morning and I snapped a picture on my iPhone...and then I thought I'd share it on the old blog.

Don't judge me for saying this, all you hip, young HGTV enthusiasts...but I don't really love the whole open-concept thing.  At best, I have a love/hate relationship with it. We did not have it going on at all in our old house in NH, where we lived for 26 years.  That house had a traditional Colonial footprint that included lots of walls.

As you will see, there aren't that many of them in our new house.  Standing near the front door, at the edge of the dining room, I can see into both the living room and the family room...and I can also see both Christmas trees.  We have a 7-foot "Griswold overlit tree" in our living room, with over 3,000 LED lights (thus the atomic blue glow coming from that area), which we got last year for our first Christmas in VA; and now we also have a 7-foot "slim" tree in the corner of our family room, which I bought this fall.  When we downsized from the rather epic 9-and-a-1/2-foot tree we had in NH, we had too many ornaments for one average-sized tree, and last year a whole storage bin filled with them never made it out of the basement.  The Rx for that situation was having two trees for our second Christmas in the new house.

I do like rooms with walls, and I miss having more of them in this new house.  (Less privacy, less places to hang stuff!)  But I also like being able to see both trees at once.  So I'm going to consider this a plus for the VA house, which--as much as I fight against change of any kind--is slowly but surely growing on me. 

What about you: do you--like JoJo Gaines--have the desire to knock down most of the walls in your house; or do you prefer having separate rooms?  Do you have only one Christmas tree, or do you have two (or more)?  Do you decorate mini trees for your kids' bedrooms (like I did for my boys, once upon a time)?

That's a lot of questions, I know!  But if the spirit moves you, leave me a message--I'd love to hear from you.  :)

One more thing: don't forget that the giveaway contest ends at midnight tonight.  You could win a copy of either Finding Grace or Erin's Ring!  It's easy to enter--just leave me a comment and you could be a winner.

My grandson G-Man is excited--I hope you are, too!

(P.S. Is there anything cuter than a pre-school Christmas show?  Rhetorical question, obviously.)

House Tour, Part III: The Dining Room

In an effort to get back to blogging for the main reason I was so dedicated to it for so many years (before the Instagram bug bit, and bit hard), I'm going to talk about something today at my neglected String of Pearls simply because it's fun for me and it makes me happy.  I doubt many people are even stopping by here anymore, because when they do, they mostly hear the sound of crickets (metaphorically speaking, of course); but if there's anyone reading this and you like a good home décor post (from someone who is most definitely NOT a professional home decorator--let's make that clear from the get-go!), you might enjoy this.  It's the third installment of a house tour I started not long after we moved to our new house (see Part I and Part II here and here; I also did this post about creating a home library).

Not too long ago, one of my daughters-in-law (blog handle "Preciosa," wife of son #3) and I were talking about whether or not a dining room is even necessary or practical anymore in this new age of mostly casual entertaining.  She was trying to decide whether or not to transform her formal dining room into a play room for her three kids who are three-and-under.  She and my son have a roomy eat-in kitchen, and their dining room is a rarely-used space.  It is quite lovely, with a Pottery Barn table-and-chairs set scored on Craisglist, walls painted a deep navy blue above the chair rail, and a gallery wall filled with their eclectic collection of decorative crosses.  But did they perhaps need a play room more?  They have one in the basement, but having one on the main floor would be so much convenient...What to do, what to do?

In the end, my daughter-in-law decided that although my son was more than ready to pull the trigger, she was not ready (yet, anyway) to give up her dining room.  And I totally get that.

I have always loved having a dining room.  The one we had in our old house in NH (where we lived for 26 years before moving to VA in 2017 to be near our kids and grandkids) was enormous.  Even though it had lots of furniture in it--including an antique buffet painted red, an antique reproduction pine pie safe with a punched-tin door, an antique sideboard that matches our oak dining set, and a lighted china cabinet--there was still plenty of room to navigate around the table.  And we're talking about a table that can comfortably seat 10 or 12.  In fact, I once set up two tables for eight in there, for a St. Patty's Day dinner party with neighbors, and it wasn't that tight.

To give you an idea of how much space we had, here are two photos from our Christmas Eve dinner in 2016, when our five boys, our four daughters-in-law, and the seven grandchildren we had at that time all came to NH for one last Christmas before our move.  We had to angle the table and add a smaller one at the end to extend it, but we all fit!

I was a little nervous about how we were going to squeeze all of our beloved dining room furniture into the space we were going to have in our new house.  As you can see from the pictures on the listing, although it is quite lovely, with that dramatic tray ceiling and the pillars, it is not enormous.

I actually considered selling my large antique oak table-and-chairs, which my mom had bought at an estate sale when I was in middle school and had always been in our house when I was growing up.  Mom had bequeathed the set, with its matching antique sideboard, to me when she and Dad downsized to a condo.  My husband and I were about to downsize now, and I thought maybe I should think about getting something smaller, something that would look better in this sort of room.  But I just couldn't do it.

All I can say is that I'm glad the new dining room opens up to the front hallway, because otherwise all of my pieces wouldn't have been able to fit.  We definitely would have had to take a couple of leaves out of the table if there had been a wall there instead of just those two pillars.

The old owners, who took a minimalist approach to this room, might look at what we've done and think it looks mighty crowded, and it kind of is; but I think we've been able to make it work.  The only piece we couldn't use in here is the lighted china cabinet that used to house some of our good china and crystal, which I repurposed as a display case for my porcelain dolls and put in our new master bedroom.

This old table was a hand-me-down from my mother-in-law.  I refinished it and gave the 

beat-up top a painted faux-marble finish years ago.  The pig is from my sister-in-law, 

who recently bought a restaurant and found it left behind. 

(I collect pigs.  Does that make me weird?)

This solidly-built antique buffet is one of my favorite pieces in the whole house.  

I found it a shop in our old NH hometown, where they sold antiques, secondhand items, 

and gifts.  I fell in love with the painted/distressed finish the seller had given it.

As you can see, there's a lot going on in this little room!  But I love a nice dining room, and I'm just so grateful that we have one in this new, smaller home in VA.  I would miss it terribly if we didn't...because I'm an old-school Grammy who likes to set the table with all the fancy stuff for holidays whenever possible.  It made me happy to set our 2017 Thanksgiving table like this.

Our new dining room is smaller than our old one, to be sure, but it feels bigger than it is because it's so open.  This is the view from the dining room table.

When you're having a large gathering at this house, you can be lingering at the table here and interacting with other guests who are sitting in the living room right across the hall.  (I know this because it's happened already!)  While I'm actually more of a fan of houses that have separate rooms and lots of walls on which to hang artwork and family photos,  I do think this house makes the most of its square footage because of its open-concept design.

Okay then, what about you?  Do you think a formal dining room is a necessity?  Do you like open-concept homes, or do you like separate rooms where you can go to escape the noise and the mess every now and then?  Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear from you!

House Tour: A Home Library (of Sorts!)

Whenever I see photos of amazing home libraries that look like this

or this

or THIS (!),

my eyes get a little green.  I can't help but envy such beautiful spaces to store and read books.

As Thomas Jefferson would say,

We had a number of built-in shelving units in our old "forever home" in NH, thanks to my husband's carpentry skills. He is not a professional carpenter; but he's a talented and exacting one, and the pieces he made for the house wherein we raised our boys were quite spectacular (said his grateful wife).

We had to leave much of the fruits of my favorite woodworker's labors behind when we moved to VA in the spring of 2017.  We miss all those handcrafted shelves; but our new neighbors (our four oldest sons, their wives, and our 12-going-on-14 grandchildren) more than make up for anything we had to give up.  They make up for it and then some.

However, one of the problems I couldn't wait to solve once we moved into our new, smaller house in VA was where and how to incorporate storage for our rather large collection of books.  As it turns out, although we do have a fourth bedroom that serves as a home office (something we never had before, and which I just love!), between our his-and-hers desks, two large filing cabinets, and various other storage pieces that house our office supplies, there was not a lot of room for shelves.  We did manage to add some, including a space-saving tall, narrow, solidly-built all-wood unit bought at a local Amish furniture store.

This one, a small cherry "wood" unit purchased at Walmart, is not nearly as solid as the tall one, but it works in a pinch.

We also managed to fit one little red "wood" bookshelf into our not-very-large family room.  It's not as well-crafted as the one from the Amish shop either (it's mostly made of particle board, a reasonably priced Target find that used to store video equipment in our NH TV room), but it works for displaying our family Bible, our college yearbooks, and some other oversized books.

Even after the shelves pictured above were filled, we still had boxes and boxes of books that needed a home.  What we ended up doing was turning each of the remaining three bedrooms of our new house into mini-libraries.

For the master bedroom, we purchased his-and-hers medium-sized solid pine shelves for either side of our bed from our go-to Amish furniture store (my new favorite local establishment).  These matching shelves were unfinished, so I gave them a light stain and a couple of coats of poly.

Mine.

His.

The little table below, which I bought with the country-style distressed paint-and-stain finish from the same Amish shop, is actually handy for holding a lamp...which I could otherwise put on my dresser, if it wasn't for the 55-inch TV we have mounted on the wall just above it.  The lamp would get in the way of the Notre Dame game, you see, or the latest episode of This Is Us, so I needed somewhere else to put it.  And how handy that the somewhere else came with space to showcase a few of my favorite hardcover books.  (The little shelf below is what sold me on the table, truth be told.)

By the way, I am aware that this master bedroom is almost embarrassing, it's so big.  I mean, we have room for a king-sized bed, two bookshelves, two easy chairs, two dressers...Oh, and there are also two walk-in closets (I claimed the bigger one!).  I'm not even going to show you our ridiculously large master bathroom.  All I can say is that we never had an expansive and glorious master suite like this when we were young parents raising our five boys.  But now we're a couple of spoiled grandparents--who've earned it, I guess?  (Sure, let's go with that.)

Anyway, the other two bedrooms have some bookshelves in them, too.

In the yellow room where our twin granddaughters usually stay when they sleep over, there is a night stand between the twin beds that was made by my husband over two decades ago for our two oldest boys' bedroom, and which he recently re-worked to add more room to store books.  It used to be stained pine, but I gave it a coat of Irish green chalk paint, and I think it looks terrific.

There is also an inexpensive Walmart faux wood unit in the corner of that room.

In the blue bedroom that I think of as our youngest son's room (mostly because he's the only one of our boys who isn't married yet), there are two nightstands that were made by my handy guy for our old master bedroom many moons ago.  I love the way they look in this VA bedroom.

Ummm...note to self:  I need to center the bed under that picture in the middle.   (A professional home decorator I am not!)

They're small, but they hold a surprisingly large number of books.

So that's the tour of our home library (libraries?), if you can call it that.

Hmmm...Were you interested in seeing pictures of the inside of my house?  I know that I love getting glimpses of the homes of bloggers whom I admire and follow...but this little cookie cutter house in a cookie cutter neighborhood in VA is hardly Gramblewood...Then again, very few houses are!  ;)

In spite of our new home's limitations, at this stage of our long and blessed life together, this is just about the perfect place for us to live. And with a little creativity, it now has the perfect number of bookshelves to keep this bibliophile happy.  For now, anyway.  As our collection grows, my ideas for creating more storage will have to grow as well.