A Writing Room & Other Loves

Hello dear friends! It's been a month today since we moved home to Tennessee and I wanted to tell you all how much I love, love, love our new home.

I hardly know where to start so will tell you about one room.

When our youngest son and his wife began looking for a house to buy for us to move back to, they looked at mid-century houses. We were all thinking of 1950s knotty pine paneled den and kitchen, a dream of mine to remind me of the house my parents built in 1956. But heavens to Betsy they were expensive. One contract fell through because of being in a flood zone with costly insurance.

In desperation at the end of a long day's house viewings, our son thought about settling for a newer, updated but characterless house. My daughter-in-law told him, "Your mom's soul would shrivel here." She knows me so well.

At almost the last day before he was to get completely immersed in a new major project at work he found this 1935 cottage with 2.4 acres.

It had plenty of the knotty pine I craved, not in the kitchen but in the big room we use as a living and dining room, a wide hall, and in two of the three bedrooms. Even the ceilings are gorgeous knotty pine, much of it in 11 inch wide boards. The large main room/living room's pine predates the 1950s Pickwick pine paneling in the rest of the house. I located pictures of paneling like in in my 1930s magazines.

One bedroom has become my office, or my Writing Room as I like to call it, even if little writing has yet been done there. It was the room we filled with boxes to be unpacked, but finally I cleared away enough space to declare myself in business.

See Otis there? He and Milo are always to be found in whatever room I'm in.

Now I have windows by my desk that truly remind me of my signature blog header. You probably noticed that I never changed my snow scene to one showing palm trees while we lived in Florida for nine months, didn't you? I bet some people wondered about snow for Dewena's Window while living at the beach but now we know it was always meant to be snow.

Here's a picture of that day on January 6th when we first pulled into our driveway in Nashville, Tennessee.

One window in my Writing Room looks toward the pond--it's our neighbor's pond but he brought us a big pecan pie to welcome us and told us he hoped we would enjoy the view and go fishing anytime we want to.

 And the other window looks out on the front yard by one of many big holly bushes loaded with red berries.

Can you see the cute black and white toile curtains in a chandelier pattern? We bought all the other curtains for this house at Goodwill but I found these on Etsy at a very reasonable price of $10 a panel. Now I'm hoping we'll eventually find a small black iron chandelier for this room to replace the ceiling fan.

I wanted black and white toile fabric in this room to complement the two old 1947 lithographs of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Au Cirque series that I've had for over 40 years.

Family photographs keep me company on the old green primitive drop leaf table that I use as a desk, because family is what it's all about.

We would never have been able to make two difficult moves in a nine months' period if it had not been for family. One son searched for, found and bought our house so we could move home, another son flew down to Florida and for two days helped RH load everything, and a third son and his wife and her sister worked all day here to make sure the house was spotless for moving day.

The actual move happened because our daughter drove me, Otis and Milo back in my car, our son-in-law drove a big 26 foot truck the whole way, and our son drove RH and his truck, pulling a trailer. We were a convoy leaving at 3 a.m. trying to beat the predicted snow storm in Atlanta and on Monteagle Mountain.

Everyone helped unload trucks in freezing temperatures including my sister's husband who also met the inspector here before the closing for the important house inspection, and RH's brother who helped RH build a bookshelf the other day for this room and is going to help him build pretty open shelving in the kitchen. 

Not only that but our youngest son, our landlord, came and helped his father install a new toilet--the old one was cute and cottagey but it was like sitting on a geyser. He also hung heavy mirrors, helped put shelving up in the laundry room and a closet, and helped his mom unpack box after box. 

Before we moved here he brought his family here to Nashville and installed a new dishwasher for me while our daughter-in-law taught our granddaughters how to pitch in and help too.

Are they not adorable? I feel like they blessed this house for their Mimi and PawPaw.

My list could go on and on of sacrificial things everyone did for us. They are my heroes-- my main hero being RH who not only let me come home but has worked his butt off in the doing of it, and he didn't have much of a butt to begin with. 

Everyone made sure our homecoming was comfortable and welcoming.

Not the least bit prickly in any way!

God bless and keep them all, and each one of you, my patient sweet visitors here at Dewena's Window!