Pimp My Livingroom

This post is not about television programs, travel or bubonic plague. It is about my all-time favorite topic: renovating our sweet and rather exasperating old house.
Yes- in May, The New and Improved Romanian Handyman showed up. Actually, we don't call him that. That would be silly.   We refer to him as "DJ Pauly G".  Not to his face- even though the girls mean it in the nicest possible way.  It is just their way of expressing the amount of his awesomeness. The truth is, the man works miracles!  Just look!

 This is the "before " shot. This living room is quite small and has one tiny window.  One!  Only a cave-dwelling troll would have thought to "improve" the place with dark varnished wood ceilings. Sadly, the previous owners were cave-dwelling trolls with a decorating budget.....

Not that our own  "improvements" over the years turned out much better.  The textured wall treatment was my bright idea.  I started hating it the minute I finished putting it all over the walls. Definitely time for a change.....

This is where Paul took down the wall between the living room and the entry hall.  The idea was to make that wasted space part of the living room and give it some much-needed volume....

It was so great to get that horrible wood off the ceiling.  But under it was tons of lathe and plaster.....

As you can see to the right in the photo,  there is
the old opening leading to the main staircase of the house  leading up to the bedrooms. This would be blocked up and the space behind transformed into a closet.....



 Dust ruled our lives for many; many days.  Every surface in the house was covered....

One of the worst things about the hated textured wall plaster was that it was so hellish to remove.  We had to use a wallpaper steamer and putty knives to chip it off little by little. It was truly Satan's Wallpaper


The green being uncovered here is the original wall color from back at the turn of the century.... So, that is an historically accurate revolting shade of green.  Call the Smithsonian!

.












As for the clean-up task-  luckily we had help from R2D2's cousin.  (see below right-hand  corner)  He's never, ever been in a movie and his name is Kevin.  Sucks to be him.

 Anyway, the above may look similar to what we started with...but it is actually COMPLETELY different.  The room is now about a meter longer, the ceiling is NOT a disgusting troll-ceiling and the floor is a lovely oak parquet instead of splintery pine....

Part III of « How to Buy a Huge, Old, Expensive Chandelier Without Even Trying »

So, there I was blithely walking around the hotel, unaware that dramatic lighting was in my future. JP told me he was going to write in a bid for the next day’s auction , I merely gave a vague « Mmmm.. that’s nice » and went back to inspecting the gruesome brown tile in the 1970’s bathroom with horrified fascination.

« Somebody chose this tile. On purpose !» I marvelled to myself.

I saw JP wander off and get into line to place his bid, but I just smiled indulgently. Kind of like when your 12 year old announces he’s going to be 'Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter' when he grows up. There’s a slight chance that you’ve got something to worry about. But it’s much more likely that it’s not going to happen.
That was my policy on the chandelier.
I found out that I was wrong a few days later when JP came down the stairs and said « Guess what? ».
I’d heard the phone ring a moment before and had figured that he’d picked it up…but I had no good guesses in mind.

Not a one.
Then he said « We got it » and I somehow knew immediately what he was talking about wasn’t something as bad as, say, head lice, but was definitely not something I would unconditionally like, such as winning a million Euros in the lottery.

Call it wifely intuition.
« We got the chandelier and we need to pick it up by tomorrow night. »
Surprise!
At least, it was a complete surprise to me.
Now, at this point, I actually could still have stopped this. We still had the right to refuse to buy the thing. But JP really wanted it and I was beginning to think that it would look kind of funky and unconventional hanging in our new room.

There’s also this: when I was a kid, a local restaurant in my hometown shut down. « Diamond Jim’s » was supposed to be pretty fancy, I guess. ( I am very hazy on the details and have GOT to ask my mom for details the whole thing) The simple version of the story is that the place sold off the furnishing and my parents ended up with two things:
a. the top part of a wooden partition set with panels of red plexi-glass.

(Yes, it was just as awful as it sounds. But hey- it was the 70’s. I don’t have to defend anything.)

and
b. a crystal chandelier
Strange coincidence, or what?
We were not, in the general way of things, crystal chandelier kind of people. In the early years, the family living room featured a gun cabinet as the major piece of furniture. (Yes, it was full of guns. Thank you for asking) But then suddenly we had a chandelier and the guns got moved to the basement and we were looking pretty fancy.

Today (40 years later!) that chandelier hangs in the foyer of my parents' very lovely home and looks pretty gorgeous.
So, I hardly had the heart to quash JP’s chandelier project. It’s possible that in 40 years I still may be looking at, enjoying the darn thing and all the funny memories behind it, right?
So, I got busy helping find someone to retrieve it. Luckily, Monica's husband didn’t have to work the next afternoon, so he and his son went to go get it for us.

From what he told me later, getting it was just awful. They showed up and were told to get the thing down and carted off, pronto. That’s right- they were expected to take it off the ceiling alone! They borrowed a ladder and a few tools and just barely managed to get the thing down. D said it was just sheer luck that he’d brought his 14 year old along for company and he didn’t know how he would have managed if he hadn’t. I felt pretty bad putting them to so much trouble…
They loaded it in the back of their station wagon drove off to meet up with JP. They had to pass the Swiss border and hope they didn’t get stopped. JP was waiting at the drop-off point in the parking lot of a cinema multiplex. He got the chandelier wrestled into our car, paid back D the money for the thing and then gave his son some cash for helping out. The whole transaction seemed vaguely like a particularly incompetent drug deal …
For a few days, the thing sat on the floor in the new room. But then JP wanted to varnish in there, so then it sat right in the middle of the kitchen for a few days.
So, I was vastly relieved to come back from an outing to Evian one day and fine the chandelier hanging in its rightful place! The electrician had come to finish wiring the room and had (with the help of two assistants and JP) gotten it up and running.

(I had taken some pics of it laying on the floor around the house, but I can't find them. If I do, I'll edit and post them)

It lights up the room quite well and certainly gets remarks from all the visitors...

A few weeks ago, I left my blog-readers with a nail-biter of a cliff-hanger: What unlikely and inappropriate object would JP end up dragging home from the hotel auction in Switzerland? A solid silver spittoon? An elephant -foot umbrella holder? A case of slightly-used pillow mints?
The truth , my friends, is somewhat stranger, and probably somewhat more expensive…

When we walked in the door of the huge old hotel, it didn’t occur to me that we would be buying anything. I was there strictly to gawk, and believe me, there was plenty to gawk at. As I mentioned in my previous post about the Royal Savoy, the place underwent a series of « unfortunate events » in the form of redecoration frenzies. One of the latest and most disastrous of these resulted in the place having a large stock of macramé wall hangings and wall-clocks made of olive-green pottery.
Yes, the 1970’s had struck hard and lethally at the old hotel.
Fortunately, they hadn’t gone completely mad and gotten rid of all the fine old antiques, but it made for some pretty odd juxtapositions- fine old 19th century landscapes hung beside terrible abstract paintings from the early 70’s, brown vinyl « leather » chairs beside a beautiful 17th century marqueterie bed.

There was plenty to gawk and the place was packed with people poking into every corner of the place, hunting for goodies. Some of them seemed obviously professional- restaurant and hotel owners hoping to snap up some useful equipment and furnishings. Some were obviously wealthy people looking for marqueterie beds and the like. Some of the latter group had me thinking: after you have been pumped full of huge amounts Botox and the Clostridium bacilum DNA in you starts to outnumber the human DNA, are you still, technically, a Homo sapien? Just asking…

Also, apparently a lot of people didn’t get the memo that excessive tanning is, like, really bad for you.

Anyway, we wandered around the first floor, admiring the fine silver and china, recoiling from the wads of knotted rope and finally went into the main dining room. This was the room that held the worst of the macramé, pottery and scribbly, depressing paintings. But looking up at the ceiling, things got rather better. There were nine large, rather beautiful crystal chandeliers.

JP liked them.
He liked them a lot.
He wrote down the lot number for one of them. (It’s the one at the front in the photo.)
He asked me what I thought.
I said:
a. It’s pretty,
b. It would look strange in a wooden chalet-style room
and
c. You wouldn’t get it anyway. There will be tons of bidders and the price will go too high..

After this, I didn’t really give it another thought.
My lovely pal Monica (who is also much smarter than me) spoke to me about it as we went upstairs and went through the rooms.
« You know Jean-Pierre really wants to bid on that chandelier, right? »
« He can write in a bid if he likes. I’m sure he’ll never get it. There’s too many people here- people with way more money than we have. »
« Are you sure? » She didn’t look convinced.
« Yes, I’m sure! » I said confidently « Otherwise I’d have to stop him from bidding, because we really don’t need a huge, expensive chandelier. »
The starting price on the thing was 600 Swiss Francs.
My plan for lighting our new room involved going to a hardware store and paying less than 100 euros for something. My idea was not to be elegant. What I had in mind was this: to not be sitting around in the dark and to not have an empty bank account.
That’s it.
But, of course, my simple, cheap plan was not to be.

To be continued....

The Royal Savoy Hotel of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Gosh, that sounds classy!
And I guess it was, for many, many years.
It’s a huge old dinosaur of a thing, dating back to the days when upper class young people from England and the USA would still swan around Europe to be «finished ».
The Americans wanted to acquire that sheen of genteel Old World culture. According to my deep analysis of this phenomena ( which mainly involved reading the book ‘Little Women‘ several times), this sheen could only be had by sitting by a lake ( preferably a Swiss lake, but a French one might do) and painting watercolors of it.

The English, on the other hand, seemed to seek ‘continental sophistication’. This is possibly involved the ability to eat roasted horse without freaking. I’m not sure.

And this was the kind of hotel where people would do this stuff. It was very fancy and very, very expensive.
And it wasn’t just the foreigners that flocked there. It was a favorite with European aristocrats, as well. In fact, the Spanish royal family lived in the hotel throughout the entire Second World War.

It was furnished with antiques from all over Europe from the 19th, 18th and even 17th century. Very chic.

But then something happened. Two very bad somethings, actually. Major remodels and refurbishings were done in the 1960’s and again in the early 1980’s.
And this was bad. Very, very bad.

The antique wallpapers and carpets all went and all kinds of newer stuff was installed. Some antiques were kept, but many disappeared and were replaced by modern 60s and 80s stuff. Bleh.
Worst of all, 19th century landscapes were pushed out of the way in favor of 1960’s art. God help them. The stuff was darn ugly and didn’t fit at all with the spirit of the building (or the spirit of good taste).

After this frenzy….nothing. Absolutely nothing for a long, long time.
And the hotel began a decline.
It began to disappoint

The internet arrived and word began to get around even faster…the Royal Savoy was musty, sad, shabby and far too expensive for what it offered. A client review from 2009 on one travel site called it a « smelly, dusty, run down big hotel ». Another person remarked « We were expecting a nice hotel but in fact it is an old, smelly and antiquated hotel ».
Ouch.

The « Grand Old Dame » had become a « crazy old homeless woman with ragged clothes and distinctly bad body odor ».

I guess it’s a good thing, then, that the place was sold recently.
And the new owners, Barwa Real Estate of the tiny (but rich!) nation of Qatar, had big plans.
Their first plan was to clear the whole place out. Everything would have to go: furnishings, bathroom fixtures, dishes, paintings, ashtrays, etc.
How would it all be gotten rid of?
It would be auctioned off.
And just who would buy this stuff?

Well….my husband would.

We leave for Paris tomorrow on the 7:30 train. I'm talking AM here, people. So EVERYTHING has to get done today.


The packing? Don't get me started on the packing. It's a nightmare. I am the world's worst packer, which is astonishing considering how darn much of it I've had to do in my life. But the problem is that I just HATE needing something and knowing that the thing I so desperately want is just sitting back at home. So, even though it's sunny, I pack rain gear. And what if there's a freak snowstorm? Better pack coats and boots. What if we get hungry for waffles? Better pack the waffle iron. And syrup! Musn't forget syrup...plus scuba gear and and a snakebite kit.
I just want to be prepared, you know?


But, as my kids would say: "That way lies madness, dude." I just have to calm down and take it easy...


But it's so hard to do that, as I'm trying not only to sort and pack, but also get Severin's room ready for the redecorating/renovation about to happen in there. We spent this morning clearing everything out and now we're trying to get all the old wallpaper down!! The twins are helping and Severin is in charge. He's working hard and is very motivated. He has asked for a Lord of the Rings-themed room. (Yes, I will do anything for my kids. Thank you for asking) By some miracle, I found a wallpaper mural of a forest in New Zealand. (Where LOTR was filmed, for those of you who have just arrived here from a distant planet) The other three walls will be done with a wallpaper that looks like metallic silver granite. The effect will be like looking out of a silver cave and out into the mysterious forest of Mirkwood. That's the idea, anyway.


This amazing transformation will be done by Cristian the Romanian Handyman, without my help or even my (rather nice) homecooked meals. JP will have the care and feeding of CtRH, and I feel rather sorry for both of them. When I told Cristian that I wouldn't be around during his stay, he wrote back. "It will be fine. There's still that pizza place in front of your house, right?", which shows that he understands that JP is not the kind of French guy that cooks. Some do, of course. He doesn't. On the other hand, he never watches soccer matches either , so I consider it to be a fair trade.





I plan to blog at least a couple of times from Paris...it sort of depends on how crazy things get. I will definitely take pictures and have lots to share: the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Orsay Museum and even Disneyland. I am SO excited! I've already seen all this stuff, but it will be so great to share it all with my children.


I just hope it doesn't rain and that we don't get hungry for waffles, because I'm NOT bringing rainboots or waffle irons. Really.

Yesterday after my morning Wii session, I wrote a long-ish blog post, cleaned the house , did several loads of laundry, made lunch, taught English down at the school, and went to the post office. By the time I got home at about 3pm, I was ready for a little break...maybe, say, sitting down with a novel and a cup of coffee? Just for half and hour or so?

It was not, of course, to be.

JP was in full project mode. He'd been writing all morning and wanted to "do" something. He decided that he would start painting the ceiling over the central staircase of our house. I got out the huge can of white paint I'd bought, but refused to participate any further. I merely suggested that he remove the spiderwebs before he started painting (which he did) and that he cover every surface below with tarps (which he did not).

Leaving him to his fate, I went down to the kitchen and heated up some coffee in my special "Mom" mug and made my way up to the attic, where JP and I have our bedroom and office. I sat down at the computer to have a quick look at my emails before settling down with my book.

I saw that a good pal in the USA was online and decided to try to "chat" with her. First time ever! What fun! Even better than reading my book!

We started typing inane, funny comments, as is the way of chat. But after only a few minutes, I heard a crash and a thump and a heart-wrenching cry of surprise, pain, misery and disbelief. I ran over and leaned over the railing. There was JP down on the second floor landing, clutching the ladder and looking down at the huge can of paint laying, dented and empty on the stairs below. A torrent of white paint poured down the stairs onto the landing below and on into the bathroom.

It was a Niagara Falls of paint right in our own home.

My first thought, to my credit, was intense relief that JP himself was not laying there on the stairs.

My next and less laudible thought was : I'm so glad that it wasn't me that made that god-awful mess!

I abandoned my chat and my coffee and went to help. I brought up a bucket of water and some rags. JP prompted dumped the water onto the huge lake of paint on the lower landing, sending a cascade down the NEXT flight of stairs, which until then had been clean.

Woe was us.


But at least it was water-based paint, right?


"If this was oil-based paint, we'd have had to move." I informed JP as we scrubbed at the mess. "You realize that don't you?"

He started at the top and I worked up from the bottom. The rags weren't getting the paint out of the cracks in the cement, so we started using scrub brushes. As it dried and sunk in further, we had to switch to steel wool.

We scrubbed for two solid hours.

The stairs ended up reasonably clean. They were originally covered in repulsive brown vinyl. JP just recently ripped it all off and exposed a layer of ancient, thick, hard yellow glue. He spent several afternoons stripping all that off and then scrubbing the cement with a special cleaning solvent. The idea was to get the stairs perfectly clean so that we could cover them with special paint for cement floors. We needed an impeccable base, as the stairs are a high-traffic area right in the center of our home. So, we're really hoping that the traces of white ceiling paint won't affect the layer of brick red floor paint we want to apply.

If I was I quick thinker, I SO would have taken a photo of the mess to post with this!

Was the light fixture from Hell worth all the trouble?

Well, JP and I ended up liking it very much. But then maybe that's just due to some Stockholm Syndrome-type reaction. You know- bonding with and showing loyalty to the source of your terror and misery......
But here it is.

My MIL says it's gorgeous. "Like something in the Chateau de Versailles" and that's a direct quote. She doesn't know the top bits are plastic, though. Not much plastic in Louis XIV trappings and accoutrements, I'm thinking. Just a guess.

The Lamp not actually in it's permanent spot. We needed a light in this hallway, so JP popped it in, despite the fact that it's a bit over-dramatic for a small upstairs corridor full of books. Eventually, it will hang in the central stairwell, which is over two stories high. Should look good there.

Oh. It's snowing. Again!

A few days ago, JP and I were browsing around a local used furniture shop when this caught my eye:

Well, it would, wouldn't it? Who could resist? Have you ever seen the like?

And only 800 Euros for the whole amazing set: a sofa, two chairs and matching coffee table! That works out to less than 100 euros per camel.
But JP refused to buy it for me.

He's so mean...

Valentine and I were at the Emmaus today. It's sort of the French equivalent of the Goodwill or Salvation Army in the USA. It's a Catholic charity where people donate unwanted stuff that is sold to finance good works.

But I ask you- who wouldn't want THIS?

When I saw it I immediately said to Valentine "Blue Haired Sparkle Jesus is SO going on my blog!!" And I whipped out my handy little red cellphone. My daughter was somewhat mortified, but is pretty used to my strange quirks. I think she was just grateful that I didn't insist on buying the thing.

I LOVE the Emmaus! I'm an archaeologist by training and we are all scavangers at heart. Some may call it digging through junk, but I call it a treasure hunt.
And even when I don't find any treasure, I often find things that are entertainingly strange and/or ugly. Today, besides the BHSJ , other things of note I saw were:
1. a stuffed wild boar's head.
2. a cookie tin showing Santa chatting with two naked women with wings as an obviously traumatised child cowers in the background. Very...um...festive.
3. an eye-searing mustard colored sofa, SO stained and ratty and diseased-looking that I remarked to Valentine: "That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. And I've SEEN stuff!". One minute later, a guy bought it and carried it off as we stood there.
Valentine said "That guy's wife is going to KILL him if he goes home with that!"

We plan to comb through the local paper with particular attention tomorrow morning, looking for an article in the police blotter about some incident of severe wife on husband domestic violence triggered in the night by a household furnishing.

As we watched an episode of Lost last night, we saw Locke dangle a plastic bag of what looked like oregano in front young Claire. I thought “ Yay for them! They can make pizza!” But of course, Claire knew what Locke did: the bag contained (dramatic music here) heroin. Naturally. Nothing as banal as a useful herb or spice.
It’s weird . Locke is a middle-aged guy that used to have a low-level job in a box company. Claire is a nice 19 year old single mom with no criminal past. And yet, like all people in movie-land, they know a bag of heroin when they see one.

“How is it that people on tv shows and movies always know what drugs look like? I’d have no clue what the heck that was.” I said to Valentine.
“Yeah.” she agreed. “ It looked like pepper to me.”
But I guess all the shows would be much less thrilling if the characters just shrugged their shoulders and started cooking……..

Now that I got that off my chest, (That felt great. Thanks.) ,on to another subject: my weekend. Saturday was spent at the Rec Center, selling off outgrown clothes, toys and videos. They had a small jumble sale/fun fair that was put on by the Embassy. I sold lots of stuff. My only complaint is that my table was in the sun and I ended up getting rather burned

There was an evening mass at our church that night. Then we followed up with dinner at a crepe restaurant. It’s a nice place, owned by a Burkinabé friend and her husband. The kids all love it, so we didn't have to sit through any suicide threats.
My only problem with the place is the Brittany seaside décor. I really, really hate interiors festooned with fishing nets, models boats and pictures of ( shudder) lighthouses. (Amazing fact: JP also has a horror of the Fishing Boat School of Decorating. We were truly meant to be together) Not a bag of heroin in sight. But then, how would I know?