Angelina's Foolproof Home Designing Hints
I can tell you all what's on my mind right now, which will send you to the psychiatrist post haste, or I can skirt the boiling issues of my brain and life, and stick with subjects that won't make you want to stab yourself. Let's take the easy route today.In my life as a housewife and stay at home mom I have made some observations that you may find useful in the arrangement of your own life:
- When designing a kitchen, never choose a linoleum that is paler than the food you usually cook. White is lovely, airy, and so elegant until splattered with tomato sauce, mud, jam, and wine. I am always suspicious of any person who installs white linoleum. Or carpet. Light colored flooring is for those people who live gently and without children.
- Bathrooms should always have ventilation. Your mind leaps to the obvious memory of the lingering odors caused by the long sits on the toilet that men tend to favor. While that is one of the reasons your bathroom should always have good ventilation, there is another. If you have a kid who get "gushers" for bloody noses frequently and has adopted the awful habit of letting the blood drip all over the floor until you come to his aid, which may be a while if you're in the middle of a fight and he decides not to ask for help, you will probably need to up your dose of medication. Sometimes I feel like I live on the set of ER. Our main bathroom has no window. No fresh air. The smell of blood has a way of lingering for a surprisingly long time. It's a smell that makes me kind of sick. What lingers is that warm metallic scent. Why on earth did the people who built this house not think of these things?
- Bed sheets should always be light in color. I have learned this the hard way. I can't afford to buy all new sheets because I just did that a few months ago. I thought to myself "why not go for a more masculine look in our bedroom and get some navy and brown colored sheets?" Yes, why not? I'll tell you why not: D-R-O-O-L is why not. Another reason is that if you or your partner suffer from dandruff, you will have to see the evidence much too clearly every morning. There is another reason but I will let your minds gently drift in that dirty direction all on it's own.
- Cream or oatmeal colored carpet in a house where kids will live is loudly not recommended. We have an oatmeal colored area rug under our dining room table that is there because the previous owners put it there and we can't afford to replace it. We could remove it altogether (which suddenly seems like a really great idea) but I worry about scraping up the hardwood floors with my chairs. This carpet is now a showcase of every craft project, every meal, every buried doggy treasure that has ever made it's way into our dining room. I used to frequently vacuum it. But I got dragged down by the necessity to do this every five minutes.
- Do not squirrel fruit away in a warm dark cupboard where you will forget about it and it will ripen and rot. This just makes good sense.
That's enough to chew on for right now. I am going to go under a dark rock now to chew my own leg off because that seems like such a reasonable response to the stresses and pressures of my life.
Of interest to the seamstresses out there: my newest sewing adventure involves conquering my twenty year old fear of sewing thin bias binding onto garments such as cobbler aprons. If any of you have any tips on how to begin and end the trim, please share. (folding the end under is bulky and my machine hates me for doing it.)
