In the Middle of Our Street: 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.