The Beach House

My family's life is extremely busy....whose isn't?  So just like this post took forever in coming, we took forever moving our project along.  We discussed how busy we were, how overwhelmed we still were from all that had been going on for the past 6 months and how our family was dealing with it all; each one of us was dealing with the deaths of our family members quite differently and it was taking a toll on everyone of us.  How were we going to bring peace to our family?  We were expecting 2 girls from Japan in only three weeks and we were not ready for them, physically nor mentally.  Evan and I made an executive decision, as many parents must do, and came to the conclusion that we were going to let the exchange company know that we couldn't host this month and we would let them know about having the Chinese boys in July.  With this off our shoulders, we then proceeded with our decision to create an Americana room.

 After several days of waiting for a time when the whole family could participate, we weren't getting anywhere.  I had tons of homework and just didn't have the time on top of everything else I was doing to stop and clean out our messy room or even supervise the kids to do it.  Finally, one day, out of frustration I think, Evan just started cleaning things out.  He moved the boxes into the game room and family room for us to look in as soon as we had a chance, and then he started moving out the furniture.

The one thing we disagreed on was the loft bed.  The loft bed was something Evan had built for our oldest daughter, Shirstin, many years ago and it was seriously the coolest piece of furniture we had in the house.  It was well used, and created space in a room that was built too small to begin with.  I felt that it was time to take it down.  I felt that it made the room look smaller because of its size and limited the way the space under it could be used.  Evan felt that it was still usable and we could utilize the space under it by creating a bunk bed under it.  This would help us when we had our foreign students because we sometimes have 2 at a time, but I was feeling it was overbearing in that room.  Evan had a good point, though, so I was sure it would stay and was okay with that decision.  Imagine my surprise when, as he was clearing out the boxes and other furniture, he also took down the loft bed!

It was getting pretty late by now, but my husband is a doer.  He cannot rest until a project is done.  So on into the late evening, he prepped the room for new paint.  It was strange seeing the room bare.  I took some time to think about all that had transpired in that room over the 14 1/2 years we've lived in this house.  Of course, there is no way I could remember everything, but it was fun to remember at least some things, like the time I had both my girls in this room and I would sing them to sleep.  I wanted them to be familiar with the hymns that were sung in church so I would start at one end of the hymn book and sing every song I knew until we finally finished with it several nights later.  I also remember the messes in that room and the fighting to get it cleaned up, and the bribing, and the pleading, and the finally doing it myself.  I remembered the laughter of the girls as they played together.  I remembered the arguing as they fought like sisters sometimes do.  When Shirstin had this room to herself, she made her own "art studio" under the bed and set up her easel so she could paint whenever she was inspired.  She had gotten paint splatters on the newly painted lavendar walls, but I didn't get mad nor did I try to clean it.  They were a part of her that I wanted to remember. I then remembered when she moved out and my youngest son, Bryant, moved in to claim the loft bed as his.  I was so afraid he would fall out despite the railing in place.  I'm sure he wasn't the first one to launch himself off the bed deliberately to land in a pile of clothing or blankets and pillows only to climb up and do it again.  Now, here we were getting ready to start a new phase in our lives.  Preparing this room for children that weren't our own to find peace and joy in a place unfamiliar to them.

The next day, Evan and Chelise went to the store and got some paint and he started right away painting the walls the off white we had chosen and then the closet door blue and the trim around it red.  He had me come take a look.  We both stood there and looked.  And looked.  And wondered what the other was thinking.  I thought it looked okay, but something wasn't quite right.  He felt the same.  We stopped for the evening and the next day had another little talk. 

Evan asked me if I could do the room anyway I wanted, how would I do it.  Forget foreign students, or guest room, and just think about how I would want a study room; the main purpose of this room after all was to be my study room and only secondly would it be a guest room.  It didn't take me more than a few minutes to explain what I was hoping for- a room that would feel like I was on the beach.  Not just any beach, with people in swim suits and playing volleyball and little shops lining the pier.  Nor did I want a beach like one you might find in New England with boats and fishing nets and seagulls, and cold winds blowing in the grasses.  No, I wanted a beach that was empty of any man made thing.  One where the sun was shining and warm.  One where only the sound of the surf was present and where one could lay on the warm sand soaking up the rays of the sun.  One where a person could find not only seashells in abundance, but also peace and quiet to think one's thoughts  and ponder on the beauty of the surroundings.  I didn't need to say any more.  The decision was made.  We were going to do a beach house!

I pulled my daughter, Chelise, in to help me with the colors.  We all decided that the walls would stay the same color since they were just newly painted.  Chelise came up with the perfect color scheme for the rest of the room.  I didn't even need to think about it, it just felt right!  We painted the doors blue- the kind of clear blue you would see near a tropical beach.  The same kind of blue we saw when we went to the Blue Lagoon in Jamaica.  The trim around the doors and the baseboards we painted green.  A sea green.  One that reminds me of another beach in Jamaica where the sand can be seen under the shallow waters of the Carribean.  A place I found relaxing and joyful despite the chaos surrounding it.  The colors were a brilliant idea!  I love them!

After we got the room painted, or I should say, after Evan got the room painted, we started moving things in.  We put in a desk that was in my older son's room, but he no longer wanted it.  It is small and white, but we will paint the fronts of the drawers the green color to match the trim.  We also left in the bookshelf that was originally in the room.  We wanted a bed since it is the guest room, but didn't have one we were excited to put in it.  Evan hunted around on KSL and found a beautiful, white daybed that matches the room well.  We found a bedspread with yellow on one side, but almost the same green as the trim on the other side!  We went back to Tai Pan and found many items to use as decoration, but we really didn't have much to put them on.  The walls were bare, too, and needed something to complete the beach house look.  We went to IKEA and found a picture and some decals to put on the wall, but nothing else that really stood out.

 After about a week, Evan told me we were going to take a look at some antique shops in Springville.  We wandered the aisles and finally found the two things that make that room!  One was a window frame complete with 6 panes.  Someone had taken this off some old house and was selling it as is.  We liked the idea of putting it on the wall with a picture of a beach behind it and use it as art work.  It looks like you are actually looking out a window at the surf.  The best part about it is that it is painted a light grayish green and matches the look we wanted!  The second item we found was an old crate made of wood and metal that is painted a light blue and again matches the look!  We completed the room with some shells we've collected over the years, some lighthouses and other knick-knacks we've had, some pictures of my sister and my niece and nephew on the beach, and an heirloom rocking chair that has been in my family for generations.  It is stripped of paint (my dad had meant to redo it before he passed away, but never got around to it) and looks perfect as it is! 

So, our room is nearly finished and only needs a couple more things to be hung up and an underbed set of drawers.  I am also looking for a great sound track with ocean sounds.  When I go into my Beach House, I am doing my homework or folding laundry, but it is relaxing to me.  I can feel like I am near the ocean away from all my troubles and worries.  I love my new room.  I love that my family has taken to calling it "the Beach House."  I love that I have somewhere to go to wind down and relax.

Americana

The first thing we did to get our experiment started was to have my teacher and mentor, Karla Nielson, come visit our home.  She walked through our home and offered suggestions, asked questions to get us thinking, and complemented our few attempts to try to decorate our home.  (I must admit that I have never had any ability to coordinate or decorate anything.  That just isn't my forte.  However, my husband has a wonderful knack for decorating so anything that has been done in our home is because Evan is so good at it.)

This project, though, is a family project so we started on day one, involving our entire family (even our oldest daughter who is married and living in another city three hours away).  After Karla left, we talked a little more and reviewed the notes we took while she was there.  We decided that we needed to do this project one room at a time so we had to decide which room was our top priority.  We were expecting foreign students in March and our spare room was a disaster area!  It had boxes, and junk from our kids who had just switched rooms and was our dumping room.  (One child moved out of her room and into my study room, and one child moved out of his small room into the other child's larger room.  He was happy to have a larger room, she was not too happy to have a smaller room, and I was left without a study room.)  You know that room that everything that we don't know what to do with it gets put there.  It also had an amazing loft bed that my husband had put up many years ago for our oldest daughter who was now married and out of the house.  It was attached to the wall and made with a real tree log to support it.  We loved that bed and I could easily see my grandkids using it when they came to visit, but....   It just made the room look small even though that wasn't the intent.  It was supposed to add space to the room because you could use the space under the loft bed.  Yet, everytime I went in there, I felt like it was small and dark and I loathed the idea of using it as a study room for myself.  That room became our number one focus.

 Two days later, we had family night at Ike's (an ice cream shop inside the Provo Beach Resort).  We brought our notebook with the notes we took and went through them again over ice cream.  We had talked about doing an Asian room since all of our foreign students that we've had are from Korea, Japan, and China.  We thought it would be fun to have something familiar for them when they came to visit.  But while we were sitting in Ike's and looking at the 50's style of the restaurant, we had a brilliant idea!  We had foreign students in our home so we could introduce them to America, not so they could feel like they were back at home.  We would love to take our students to other parts of our beautiful country, but time and funds just won't allow it.  So instead of doing an Asian room, why don't we bring America to our home so our students could experience as much as they could without leaving Utah?  We decided to do an Americana room and include bits of other states in the room as well.  We started coming up with all kinds of ideas of how to decorate that room.   We talked about what colors we wanted, and what things we could put on the walls.  When we left Ike's, we had a good idea of how the room was going to look and we felt great!

A week later, we had another family night out, this time at Home Depot.  We spent a long time going over paint chips and picking out the colors we imagined our Americana room having.  We might have spent too much time there, but we did finally leave with handsful of paint chips to try out at home.  Once home, we put all the chips together and picked out the few we thought would look best- some different shades of red, white, and blue.  I took the chips we had chosen to Karla to get some help with the ones she thought we should use and would add a bit of uplifting as well.  She didn't say it, but I could tell she wasn't as excited about this room as we were.  I'm pretty sure she was concerned with the not so bright colors we had chosen, the red and the blue.  However, she helped me choose a shade of each of the colors and gave me some quick instructions on how to use them without having them overwhelm us.  Finally, we had a shade of white that we would paint the walls, a shade of red that we were going to paint the trim, and a shade of blue that we were going to paint the doors.

A few days later, we all went to the Tai Pan store!  I had been through the one in the mall and wasn't very excited about it, but this trip was to the stand alone store several miles away.  I had never been there and wasn't sure what I would find.  It was fantastic!!  It had so many things we could use!  We all traveled around the store together and spotted anything that looked Americana and pointed out other things we could incorporate into our room.  We had only intended to spend a few minutes in there, but ended up spending over an hour.  We had to leave then because it was closing time!  If you haven't been to that store, you really should go!  It has so much stuff and much of it at reasonable prices!  After carefully going over as much as we could, we selected a few items that we felt we needed for our Americana room.

The next step was to tackle the mess.

Our old spare room/junk room.

Picking Americana colors.

All the paint chips we picked out for our Americana Room.

Treasures from Tai Pan.

This is an experiement in color psychology.  While taking an introduction to interior design class, I heard a little about color psychology.  The colors you use in your home- on the walls, your furniture, the carpets, accents- can have an effect on your overall mental health.  Darker colors can subdue your emotions and aren't that great for a depressed person or someone who is prone to periods of feeling "blue".  Brighter colors can uplift and cheer a person, but too bright and you can be overwhelmed.  Okay, so that is an oversimplified explaination of color psychology.  It is actually really involved and includes hues, values, and intensities of each color.

When I was hearing and reading about color psychology, I couldn't help but think about my family and what we were going through.  My husband has been working from home for the past ten years, my oldest son is Type 1 Diabetic which is a difficult thing to deal with especially when you feel all alone, we are all without energy most of the time and have a hard time being motivated.  Then, about 6 months ago, my sister and her entire family were killed in a plane crash.  There's no need to say how devastating this is and has been for my family to deal with.  My husband and I knew we needed to do something for our family, but what was the question.

While learning about color psychology in class, I thought about the colors of my home and how they might be contributing to our home's sad mood.  The family room is blue!  And it has a darker blue border near the ceiling!  Wow!  We were perpetuating our depression with our very environment!  In my mind I went on a virtual tour of our home and realized that the "white" walls of the hallways are tinted blue, some of the kids' bedrooms were painted when they were little and the colors of the walls didn't match their personalities anymore.  The game room had last been painted when the kids were little and there was still a cartoonistic mural of hills and clouds and blue sky- great when the kids were toddlers, but way outdated now.  I have never been really good at decorating my home and I was seeing that my lack of caring or even knowing how to care about my family's environment could possibly be taking a toll on my family.

I approached my teacher and explained a little about what my family has been going through, and she so graciously agreed to help me and my family in our journey to redecorate our home to help promote peace and happiness.  She came into our home a few weeks ago, gave us suggestions and tools, to help us get started, and has taken on an advisory role to continue to help us in our journey.

Currently, we have already nearly finished with one room, but I will go back and retell the experiences we've had while deciding on the priority and ideas we came up with and how we got to where we are now.  Come along with us as we travel on our family journey of rediscovering life and the colors that we take along with us!