A surprise! 1962--The Living Room
Thanks to all this decluttering, I have finally located some pictures I've been chomping at the bit to find!
Before we moved into this house, we were renting an apartment. We were one week away from closing on a house when the deal fell through. The apartment was already rented and we needed to bout OUT by that Saturday. We were effectively homeless. We put everything in storage and rented a hotel room.
My husband is a paint contractor. We were praying about what to do and God reminded my husband of a customer of his who owned her mother's house. Her mother had died two years before and the lady was saving the house for when her daughter graduated from college. My husband gave her a call and she was happy to have us rent her house on a month by month basis (and also do some paint work while we were there).
The kicker was that the house had been decorated in 1962. Tastefully. The mother was such an immaculate housekeeper that everything was in AMAZING condition considering 37 years had gone by!
We lived there for four months and we had a ball stepping back in time. Everything was so wonderfully put together and yet very functional and compact.
I'm going to show you the pictures in three posts as I want to write about specific things. I have only five photos and only of the first floor. We did not get any of the basement or the upstairs. I'll have to just describe them. (These pictures were taken before we got a digital camera, so the processing was what it was. I tried to brighten them as much as I could.)
The mother's color scheme was one I've considered copying. She used orange, sky blue, and sage green. You'll see it throughout, carried from one room to the next and into the kitchen.
I'll start with this picture. The room is long and narrow, the length of the front of the house. In this corner you see a cozy nook for reading or talking. The chairs have the three colors in them. The rug is wall to wall short shag. It was sage green with every few strands being the orange color. The wall is blue and sage "antiqued" paneling. Notice the floating shelf above the fireplace and the kid-pleasing orange-ish chair that spins around. Also notice the glass block on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. At the base of that rectangle of glass is a window box with fake ferns. I found that out when I tried to water them.
The above picture was taken from the little desk in the corner. As you'll see in the next pic, the desk was situated to make a little "office" area with floating shelves behind it. My FAVORITE part of this room, however, is the couch. The couch has polka-dots in, of course, orange, sky blue, and sage. I wanted that couch. I love how the room was decorated in such a way as to create three separate functional areas.
When I finish a post and "publish," I am never able to click on the picture and have it go to a new screen and be bigger. I can do that on other people's blogs. Will you please click on the pics and see if they work? Let me know if they don't. Then let me know how I can make it do that!
Tomorrow: 1962--The dining room.
9 comments:
I could not get them to get bigger by clicking. But that couch is REALLY cute. I love the color of the walls too.
Love the pictures...I really like how spare rooms were then. It seems like nowadays we seem to have so much stuff that we think we can't live without. And I'm a guilty party in that respect. Just need to get ruthless! :)
I posted the pictures in a separate post and they seem to be clickable. I guess I get a choice of enlargable pictures OR writing, but not both in the same one!
Though there were no clothes in the house, everything else was as the mother had left it. All the kitchen cabinets were full and the desk had stationery in it. It was so freeing to have my stuff in storage and live with JUST what was in the house.
That was ten years ago. Sadly it took me until the last six months to really get ruthless myself!
Wow, that was a trip back in time. What a beautiful room. Even though I grew up in the 50's and 60's most people I knew didn't have rooms that looked like that!
Packrat--I know what you mean. The lady who lived here and decorated was an artist. She and her husband built the house in the mid to late 50s and she decorated it in in this fashion in 1962.
I would never have thought to add the sky blue into the mix, but it works so well.
My upbringing was 60s and 70s--with lots of orange, avocado, and goldenrod!
Try linking the pictures to.. the pictures... Hmmm, that was less than clear.
Okay, so if your image is http://somewhere/something.jpg, then after adding it to your post, simply make the image a link pointing to http://somewhere/something.jpg
Unfortunately, Blogger seems to have an issue with linking pictures... So I just force it via HTML Edit mode. But for the non-geeks, the non-HTML workaround I see:
(1) Insert your picture as usual.
(2) Add temporary text on the same line as your picture, immediately after it. I used the word 'test', nestled right up against my picture.
(3) Select the whole thing - text and image together - and create the link to your image's location. (You should see your temporary text turn blue.)
(4) Move your cursor between the text and your image, and delete the extra text.
You should now have a linked image. Once your post is published, clicking on it should take you to the full-size image.
Is this how other people do it? Who knows? Perhaps some services automate this. I only know how to fake it. ;)
Rini--Now THAT's how you clearly explain something!
Thank you--it makes perfect sense.
I'm in the learning process with the html.
How far things have come since simple flow charts back in the dark ages (when I was in college).
Anyone remember the orange letters on the black screen? The monitor and the computer as a one-piece unit?
My, I AM dating myself...
What a wonderful treat for the grandaughter to inherit. I would love to do over a house in 'modern 50s' but since back in our 1700s house antiques and early american seems most appropriate.
50sGal--You'll be sad to hear that, upon inheriting, the granddaughter totally redid the interior. Now they're selling it. If I had known they were going to do that, I would have been over their claiming much of that furniture!
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