Pink Panic, Part II

The other day I documented all the evidence that the former owners of this house had PINK on the brain. Here is a remnant of the carpet that covered the house when we moved in.

This carpet is in a closet, which explains why it's kind of dirty. Don't remember to vacuum the carpet very often. Housewife Extraordinaire I am certainly not.

But I try. I really do.


Next, we have the wallpaper flap that my 4-year old tore last week. It's hard to see the color, but we see two different shades from the same family. Let's call them, say, Fleshy Pink, with carnation pink peeking out from underneath.

That means for several years this bathroom sported the following colors: pink, burgundy, black, and light blue.

Can we call that a color scheme? The word "scheme" suggests an essence of planning. I don't really see that here. It's the color wheel on drugs.

And finally, we have the color of paint that emerged underneath the white paint that is flaking off the windows. Because painting windows is such a great idea!

At this point, one wonders if there is possibly a mental disorder that causes people to latch onto one color and never let go. I bet I know what color this lady's robe was ... and her favorite pair of polyester pants ... and the afghans that she knitted for her granddaughters.

Now, don't get me wrong. Ever since taking a good look around the house, I've noticed some of the things that we have which I previously thought were "old" and "ugly. " And yes, they are old, but since deciding to work with this 1953 ranch house (rather than against it), I've begun to reassess some things.

In our kitchen, for example, we have an original Nutone exhaust fan. Don't squint too much at the picture or try to enlarge it, because I don't want you to notice the dust and grease that are inevitably one with the fan. And those fingerprints? They don't exist. It must be your imagination.


I also have some original cabinet hardware in my bathroom which I only paid close attention to the other day, when I had cabinet hardware on the brain after looking at it all day on the 'net. It's subtle, but it is totally 50s. The gentle bow, the shining chrome ... I've developed a brand new appreciation for it. Of course, it would look a lot better if the rest of the bathroom contained the original chrome fixtures that surely were there (recessed toilet paper holder, etc), but I'll take what I can get at this point. It's refreshing to see at least a couple things that weren't painted PINK.

One of my newest favorite things about this house is a recent import. I was scouring the 'net looking for a black rotary dial phone. Why, exactly, would I want to go back to the god-forsaken method of rotary dialing when I could whip out my cordless and not be tethered by ever-tangling cords? Well, that one is simple. My cordless phone sucks.

Before discussing my cool retro phone, let me digress for just a second. I have a "newfangled" 5.8 gigahertz phone -- one that should be way better than the 900 megahertz phone I owned about 7 years ago. The two phones are very different on this point: the 900 megahertz phone worked a lot better than this one. With the 900, I could walk around my entire yard and still get great reception. With the 5.8, I can't even walk out on my front porch without the static starting in. With this disgust fresh in my mind, I went searching for a phone that worked no matter what. Sure, I can't walk around with it, but at least I'll hear it ring when I'm dead.

Anyway, after looking high and low for a phone that was within my price range (who knew that rotary dial phones were all the rage, especially red ones?), I found a website that had reasonable prices and an interesting selection. I selected a black rotary dial phone, and it shipped in about 4 days. The phone, though from the 80s rather than the 50s, has a ring that can be heard when I'm outside, and it also gives me a little jolt of nostalgia ever time I hear it. My one regret is that I didn't find a phone that was fully modular, meaning that the cord has removable jacks at both ends so I can switch out the short cord for a longer one. At present, I can merely stand there and talk on the phone. No biggie. Once I get the new countertop, it'll force me to stand there while I admire the little sparklies in the quartzite. ;-)

Remodeling for the rest of us

I hate looking at design idea books. Oh sure, they're nice for oooohing and aaaaahing over, or mentally collecting names of products you'd like to use (but can't afford), but they're just impractical for someone like me. Y'know, someone who has cabinetry from Sears with early American hardware. It's hard to design a look around that, if you know what I mean.

Someone really needs to publish a book for the rest of us. Something entitled "People Who Have 1950s Home That Have Been Desecrated Beyond Recognition -- A Tale of Hope." The pages would be filled with homes that may have been nice back in the 50s, but whose decor suffered terribly in subsequent decades. Perhaps the book could highlight homes that have features that are plain mysteries. For example, why does a room in my basement have 50s style wallpaper ... on the ceiling? The rest of the room is not finished; the walls are concrete brick that's been painted with waterproof paint. If someone actually had used that for a bedroom at one time, then I'd peg them for an emo, recluse, or possible vampire. Yet there's wallpaper on the ceiling. Riddle me that.

I have a cabinet in my bathroom that looks normal enough, but the bottom shelf is just an open hole. Initially when I moved in, I thought "laundry chute!" But the chute ends up nowhere by the actual laundry room. If I actually dropped anything down there, it would near, if not actually IN, the toilet of the spider-infested bathroom below. Although the opening has provided great fun for my boys since they've discovered it (Spider-Man is dropped through there quite frequently in his quest to outsmart Venom), it's yet another unexplained feature of this home.

While I enjoy looking through the decorating books that show us Italian ceramic floors and 18th century farmhouses with original furniture, I need a book that helps me overcome the impulses and fads of previous generations. There's orange flowered wallpaper on the wall underneath my sink, and it's calling to me. Send help.

One man's style is another man's ugly

When we first moved into this house, the plan was easy: fix it all up in 6 months and transform it into a house we love.

And eight years later, here we are! Just beginning the major improvements to this place.

Oh, there have been other things, of course. The basement was tiled so we no longer had any more water problems, the roof was reshingled, the bedroom was recarpeted to remove the PINK carpet that plagued this home, and numerous other minor details. Now we're ready for the big stuff, and I'm kind of scared.

This are decisions we have to live with for the rest of our lives -- or until we sell the house.

The improvements we have made, though irreversable, have begun to bring this home into the 21st century, however. Take a look at this picture from when my oldest boy was a wee little tot:

The kid saves the picture once you realize what's behind him. Fake brick! That's right ... someone's brilliant decision to put fake brick on an interior wall, and a very bad imitation of brick at that. Perhaps the brick would have been more tolerable, say, if it weren't paired with the one color in the world that would make the entire room give anyone a migraine: pink.

The wall didn't last long after this picture was taken. Soon after, it was painted the same color as the other walls.

I hadn't realized how much I disliked this wall and the pink carpet of this house until I went looking for evidence of what this house originally looked like. NO pictures whatsoever of the pink carpet in multiple rooms. Although I was pregnant soon after we moved in here, I do have recollections of sweating like a pig with my overly large belly while my husband and I ripped out that pink carpet to reveal the hardwood floors underneath.

I saved my child from having to be born into a Pepto Bismol world. There is no greater love.

A completely schizophrenic bathroom

I expected something different. After prying up the existing vinyl flooring, I have discovered that my horribly decorated bathroom has burgundy tile, black trim, and, underneath the current floor, this:

Light blue ugly tile.

If there's not a more messed up color scheme in the entire world, I don't know what is.

I was hoping for 50's cool. Instead, I got mid-century horrific. (Side note: see the pink squiggly carpet fibers that were stuck under the threshold? That lovely pink stuff was what 95%of this house was covered in when we moved in.)

I know, I know, the current tile isn't that far off from what's underneath, but at least that had burgundy accents in it, and it looked just so darn cute (gag) with the basket and bunny wallpaper. This color scheme? Doesn't work. And if the pink paint underneath the wallpaper was original to the house, then I'm thinking that the person responsible for coordinating colors in this bathroom should be convicted of cruel and unusual punishment. To our eyesight, that is.

Burgundy plastic tile and .... ?

Although the majority of our renovations center around the kitchen/dining room area, we also plan on doing something (we don't know what) to the bathroom. I've always hated this wallpaper -- too cutesy country, with a bunny 'n' basket border.

A couple weeks ago my 4-year old found a small little loose bubble along the seam. Doing what most 4-year olds would tend to do, he pulled until he had loosened a great big flap of wallpaper. His brother, of course, noticed in good time and wasted no time hopping in the Tattlemobile. I thought about giving my youngest son permission to keep going until all the ugly stuff was stripped off. That wouldn't be child labor, would it? I mean, he's my own son, and he loves me, and I'd be giving him permission to do something that he thought was naughty.

Then I remembered that once the old stuff was off, I had to figure out what to replace it with (and scrape off the scrappies, etc.), so I told my son he did a very bad thing, and sent him off to play.

Underneath the wallpaper exists pink paint. When I saw that, my mind started thinking "Cool retro pink bathroom!" And that would be entirely possible, but the plastic tile isn't pink. It's burgundy with a black border. Although I'm aware that a 50s bathroom may very well mix burgundy, pink, and black, it doesn't seem to fit here. Now the question remains: what's underneath this floor?
White tile? Pink tile? No tile at all?

Later, because my husband expects me to be neurotic about what's original in this house, I am going to find out. I've got a crowbar, and I know how to use it.

And if it turns out to be old tile with possible asbestos, then expect me to do exactly what a did about 7 years ago to an entryway: rip said tile out without a care. This is what you get from a new homeowner so focused on a task that the possibility of asbestos did not exist.

To this day, I'm not sure if that tile DID have asbestos in it. Let's just say that if it was there, then this blog may run for a shorter time than originally planned.

Let's hope it's ugly!

One of my biggest fears will come on the day that the custom countertop guy comes to install the Silestone. Why? One thing I never realized before is that the former owners had the new (ugly) tiled countertop dropped over the old countertop.

One can still see the outline of the rounded edge of what had to be a good old 50's Formica countertop (the metal around the edge is gone, alas). I had noticed the outline before, but didn't think much about it. When the countertop guy commented on it, my mind started racing.

What if those countertops are the coolest retro thing I've ever seen? What if he pulls off the tile overlay and there exists something like this?

You know what I love most about this picture? See the "Early American" arrow cabinet hardware? See my earlier post about said cabinet hardware? Now do you see why my mind is flirting with the possibility that my kitchen may have looked like this back in 1953?

I know, I know, the Silestone is beautiful ... and whatever's underneath is surely ruined beyond repair from the new countertop existing (and being adhered too) the old one. I just can't help but wonder.

I'm thinking I should be conveniently out of town when the countertop guy comes a'callin'. I don't even want to know what I'm missing.

Reinventing the 50s

One of the decisions we tackled once our remodeling project became a reality was countertops. Currently we have the ugliness known as tiled countertops -- cream-colored tile countertops whose grout is dissolving around the sink, and whose nooks and crannies harbor bacteria I don't even want to think about. (I tend to just aim the Clorox spray, turn my head, and pray that all the little critters are obliterated upon contact.)

At first, I thought I wanted just a plain old Formica. I even flirted with the possibility of getting one of those fun retro boomerang Formicas, or the virr varr pattern. Then I came to my senses are realized that unless we were planning on staying in this house until we died, it probably wasn't the wisest choice to go all-out retro. Gotta think about resale possibilities, after all.

How many mottled brown varieties of Formica can possibly exist? (A lot, it turns out.) I just sat and stared at all the gobs of samples on chains, realizing that I had absolutely no starting point. I had no colors picked out yet, so I couldn't even narrow down the choices.

By the Formica display, however, was a beautiful, sparkly little gem: a sample of Silestone called Stellar Night. The online sample doesn't do it justice, but here's a shot I took of the sample at home:

Try to ignore the computer glare an think of a -- well, stellar night. Black sky with little white/silver stars. That's what this baby looks like. No matter how many samples I browsed through (Formica, marble, granite, etc), I kept coming back to this. It struck me as being a nice contract between 50s style and modern.

As I was soon to find out, however, having a black countertop severely limited my options for flooring ... especially when I was planning on plunking down a red chrome table in the midst of said flooring.

A question of cabinet hardware ...

The cabinet hardware we currently have has always struck me as ugly. It almost looked like something that came from a 70s or 80s obsession with everything cowboy.

I tried to imagine how they would look once the kitchen was redone, for we will be having kind of a black and white theme going on, and these cabinets (original to the house) will be painted white. Sure, I'd love to get new cabinets. But, ah, there's a little bit of a price issue there.

So the other day I was browsing through my new bible -- a 1957 Sears catalog that I snagged off eBay, and lo and behold, I find this:

















Turns out that the ugly arrows are original to the house. Argh! How I wanted to get rid of them and replace them with chrome, but now I'm rethinking it. (Just for the record, we do NOT have the hinges with the straps. Thank god for that; it would be entirely too much.) No surprise, these are "Early American" style -- back when people weren't sure whether to decorate with a modern flair or cling to the days of yore, so they tended to do a little bit of both.

Taking the plunge (in more ways than one)

Everything has to start somewhere, along with this chronicle of our journey to restoring our 1953 ranch home to its former glory. When Jason and I bought this house 9 years ago, we were childless and anxious to just live in our own place for once. We overlooked a lot of stuff -- made some stupid "first time home buyer" mistakes, but we're stuck with it, and we're OK with that. We've been making improvements through the years, and we realize how that we're kind of hooked on this place. Not for the horrible interior (decorating gaffes of the former owners), but we love the location of this house. High on a hill, surrounded by 6 or so other houses, all with huge yards, lots of trees, privacy, and quiet. We could do without the barking dogs all around us, but we're tolerating it.

We are now at the point where we are ready to renovate this 50s house, and since I love the quirky style of the Fifties, it wasn't hard to nail down a general look. I really wanted to find a style that was in between genuine Fifties (which bordered on ugly at times) and modern cool, but without the coldness. You could say that my inspiration came from a 1956 Chevy or something along those lines: colors, chrome, and style.

A year or so ago, I found a place that sells retro chrome tables, complete with custom made chairs. I've had my eye on a table with red cracked ice laminate, but there's one problem: our 1953 ranch home apparently wasn't built for people who liked to sit down while they ate. Sure, there's a small space where one can eat on a small table, but we currently have a family of four, and it just isn't working. For all of us to fit around the table, we have to pull it out from against the wall, and everyone squeezes into their chairs. It's getting old, let me tell you.

This fall, we plan on making it all right. We're going to knock the wall down between the kitchen and an adjacent bedroom, and that will become our dining room. We have some other stuff on the docket too, but this dining room is the priority before winter hits. I refuse to spend another winter cooped up in this house without a nice place to relax and eat with my family.

I have learned a lot from reading other people's blogs regarding 50s renovations, so I created this blog to hopefully help others in their renovation quests as well. I'm not expert, but I'm in the trenches now too. ;-)