operation rainbow house

I have often been neglectful of my environment. I haven't given everyday beauty its due in our varied living spaces, instead finding a kind of strange, adolescent satisfaction in the hodge-podge effect that years of hand-me-downs and thrift store shopping creates. Mid-century modern? Art deco? Country? Sure, those are fine decorating styles, but why don't we ever read about Eclectic Rescued-from-the-Sidewalk Chic?



Though our budget is limited as ever, when we moved to this house something changed. After years of cultivating an urban adult identity, I found myself smack in the middle of the suburbs, complete with a split level house from the 60s. The situation demanded action. We could not be passive about this living space. Especially since I spend so much time at home with the children, I feared that without a creative approach, this place would break me.

And since I really do believe the stakes were and are that high, Mike agreed that painting the kitchen pink was a good idea. And the bedroom purple, the living room blue, the playroom green, and the bathroom fuschia. That's my decorating style: rainbow. It could be that I am overly influenced by the six year old girl who lives with me, but I don't think so. When we came here, I wanted light and color everywhere, the most vibrant and cheerful surroundings manageable. With the addition of a gorgeous piece of Finnish fabric-turned-tablecloth pulled from a basement and donated to the cause by a friend over the weekend, I think I finally, officially have my Rainbow House.

Mike started it, you know. He surprised us all when we first moved in by arranging the books in the big shelf neither alphabetically nor thematically but by color. Rainbow order!! we exclaimed. The crazy quilt that once adorned a wall in my dad's office helped inspire us too. So we still live in a house of hand-me-down and thrift store treasures (example A below, the most recent find, resplendent orange corduroy!). But there is a greater, more beautiful organizing logic in place.

I used to think simmering soup all day was all it took to make a house into a home - but now I think the surfaces, colors, and piles of books bring a defining comfort all their own. Something about that tablecloth tipped the scales. We're staying the course, creating the rainbow house I imagined when we first arrived.