Vintage Western for My Texan

We moved to a 1935 cottage and cottage rules here...except in one room.

My husband's bedroom is Western, no doubt about it.

The old knotty pine paneling suits it and all of his vintage Western touches look at home here.

These 1950s cowgirl boots that RH's father had custom made for his wife (RH's stepmother), take center stage here. Our daughter used to wear them.

There are other Western reminders in RH's bedroom. 

Let's put some Texas swing music on and show you around.

My Texan is proud of his roots. His mother's father's father's father, a French Huguenot, settled in Texas in 1833. We used his first name for one of our sons but couldn't quite get up our nerve to name one after his middle name:

Ptolemy

RH is also proud of his other heritage. His mother's mother was a Cherokee.

Here's a photograph of RH with his beautiful mother, older brother and little sister taken with Tex Ritter, one of the early "singing cowboys" in many movies. The photograph was taken about a year after Tex Ritter's "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling" won an Oscar for Best Song in the movie High Noon.

My husband remembers Mr. Ritter telling him "Don't touch the gun, son."

I gave RH this vintage steer horn mirror for Christmas many years ago, paying for it on layaway at an antique store.

For a while I tried to corner the market on these little china cowboy hats.

Our daughter surprised her daddy with this pretty painting one Christmas.

It hangs over his chair.

This picture of Sequoyah and his Cherokee alphabet was a gift from a son.

But the 1960 cancelled check that came with it drawn on the Texas State Bank makes us smile too--$45.50.

I never did get around to baking a cake in this heavy pan shaped like the state of Texas, but it makes a great catchall for little things in his room.

I cut a few herbs to go with some blooms for RH's bed table.

The curtains we found for the bedroom came from Goodwill when we moved here in January.

You might think these curtains don't belong in a Western room but when I spotted four panels I grabbed them. I thought they were just the right touch to give a little old world elegance to the room.

We liked them so much that I found another two panels on eBay after finding a label that they were Burlington, a rare pattern called Monaco Rose Hydrangea. 

Another trip to Goodwill produced a Longaberger tabbed curtain that was perfect to cover the wide closet that didn't have a door.

I need to start searching Goodwill again for frames for these 1958 lithographs of famous western artist Charles M. Russell.

I think they'd be perfect lined up vertically between Sequoyah and the Pottery Barn silver mirror the kids gave me for my birthday one year. I thought RH's room needed a little sparkle and swapped mine for his old oval wood framed mirror that seemed to disappear into the knotty pine.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing RH's Western bedroom.

Since I've shown you the listing photos in every other room in our new home, here's what this room looked like when it was for sale.

It seems like Western never goes out of style, it just keeps getting reinvented. Maybe it's because Western is intrinsically an honest-to-goodness American look. How could we do without it?

While we both love the old cowgirl boots in RH's room, and I have used them many times on a Western table as a vase for his birthday dinner, I think that someday I'm going to surprise my Texan with a pair from the King Ranch 
collection.

Or should a Texan pick out his own boots?

"Counting Flowers On the Wall...."

The old 1966 song of the Statler Brothers ran through my mind over and over as I crawled into my bed one afternoon this week trying to catch up on rest I've missed at night for a week now, coughing my throat raw.

Tissue boxes have been my best friend for eight days now.

The afternoon that I was lying in bed alternating between chills and sweats,

my brain serenading me with the lines,

"Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all...",

I wondered when I would ever feel well enough to get

photographs of my bedroom for my blog as well as

those for RH's bedroom.

I reached for my phone and shot up at the new fir beadboard ceiling that RH worked on all last week, tearing down a horrible acoustical tile ceiling, thankfully the only one in the house.

That brown thing in the corner that's for the new molding will be painted white when RH finds time to do touch up painting on the walls that he also painted last week with Benjamin Moore Dove White--or the Home Depot's copy of it.

I turned to my left and snapped my reading chair and bed table.

Yep, there's Cepacol and Vick's Vapor Rub and the toilet paper roll I was forced to use when RH had to go buy more tissues. 

And my tall vintage rose lamp that was carefully packed for the move in a huge box by itself with lots of pillows around it.

Otis usually sleeps in my chair while Milo burrows under a blanket in his bed.

Outside one window the tulip poplar is loaded with yellow flowers.

And there's a treasured old piece of embroidery.

I turn over to the right and see my mother's red Bible and another beloved lamp. RH has both my bedside lamps on a remote where I don't have to get out of bed to turn them off after reading at night.

On the far wall is an old lithograph of John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows that I've had for fifty years.

I sang "Counting flowers on the wall that don't bother me at all, playin' solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one, smokin' cigarettes and watchin' Captain Kangaroo, now don't tell me I've nothin' to do" over and over as I coughed continuously and actually thought I had a brilliant idea to shoot the photos for my bedroom reveal from a sick bed.

Fever does strange things to a mind.

Yesterday I actually made my bed and didn't get into it.

Progress.

I do think my bedroom is a vast improvement from the listing photo, don't you?

The fan's gone now. We moved a light fixture from the hall into my bedroom and one from the kitchen into the hall.

A few final photos...will you forgive me for so many, 

maybe for one reason only?

Not because I've been sick but because.....

It's my birthday!!!!

I received beautiful cards...

And Jo Malone Tuberose and Angelica cologne...

And the loveliest flowers...

And a new sink, complete with installation!

Not to mention a whole kit of Young Living Essential Oils that I've been wanting, and a pot of African Paradise that I tried this afternoon in the shower.

And herbs all potted up from RH in 35 year old Italian terracotta pots given to us by RH's brother....

Oh the pictures could go on and on and I bet you're so glad they're not!

My heart is full of thankfulness for coming home to spend this birthday in our sweet little 1935 cottage.

And I'm am so very grateful for each of you who visits Dewena's Window.

Thank you for your patience viewing this harebrained way of posting my bedroom reveal.

Love to you and God bless you,

Dewena

Oreos and Change of Plans

In a post about change of plans, my change of plans have been trivial compared to those whose homes lay in the path of tornadoes and others who may now be dealing with all forms of bad news.

Let's keep them in our prayers and hearts.

This is a purely trivial post on a change of our plans.

I had planned to show you one more room in our new old house, RH's bedroom.

Yep, we each have our own bedroom now--due to different sleep schedules and being too easily disturbed during the night when the other one gets up for nocturnal visits to the bathroom.

RH's bedroom is much like my writing room that you've already seen, paneled in Pickwick knotty pine on walls and ceiling. I had planned on doing spring cleaning in there and showing it to you next, and our youngest son was coming in to photograph it professionally for me.

There will be more about him in a post soon as his second season as technical director of the HGTV series "We Bought the Farm" begins later in May.

Last Monday morning RH decided to just put 4 nails in the ceiling molding in my bedroom as I'd been complaining about it being loose and debris falling down from it.

But first he decided to pull the molding loose to look.

If you notice that top right photo, there was nasty debris under the molding. Yuck, someone had not done a very good job in there many years ago.

Four days later RH and a friend had torn down a hideous old tile ceiling, stained and installed a beautiful new fir ceiling, and painted the room.

So sometime soon I'll be showing you that room and hopefully the other bedroom too. But instead of styling and photographing bedrooms for my blog this weekend, we played.

Well, my granddaughters and I did. Their parents and RH worked in the yard. But even they took time out to enjoy being outside and to play with a drone by photographing the surrounding hills.

I personally received a clover blossom necklace and tiara fashioned by gifted hands and even Otis got decorated with a blossom.

We met other family for dinner out, played Go Fish, and laughed and talked.

And of course we had a big waffle breakfast on Sunday morning.

Somebody really likes fruit better than waffles.

And Oreos. She really likes Oreos, and hopping on PawPaw's stomach at night while he's resting.

She knows he's just an old softie inside. 

Kind of like Oreos.

And while there's lots of good stuff on the inside, I have to say the outside is pretty sweet too.

I hope your weekend was a good one and that all your change of plans turned out for the best. 

And have a cookie every once in a while.