Joanne'ing Up The House

Living back in my childhood home has been....an adjustment.  For one thing, I feel guilty if I'm not killing myself working on the place.  When we lived in BBay, it never even crossed my mind to feel guilty if I took two days in a row to make crafts and watch TV in my jammies.  But here, I feel like I'm being scrutinized by....well, I don't know who but the townie gossip grapevine has and will always be alive and well.  I would hope no one mentions us and I'm flying under the radar but that, sadly, is not so in a town like this.  

As a result, our to-do list, which should've taken at least a year, was done in about 5 months.  There's still a ton of work that needs to be done but it already looks better than it has in 20 years.  

Decorating the inside was very strange at first.  My mother was a complete nazi about holes in the walls.  Her taste in decorating was awful.  But still, overcoming that 'fear' and anxiety of putting push pins into the knotty pine was difficult.  All my friends said, 'Make it your own'.  So I did.  This post is of pics from the second floor.  

Master Bedroom 

I decided to keep the bureaus because they are really big....and also really heavy.

Bedroom closet.

Hallway landing.  The stairs would be on the right, just out of this pic.  I'm standing in the master bedroom doorway.

In the hall looking towards bathroom and walk in closet.

I pretty much saved my old room for last.  I hung the beads back in the doorway.  Those came from the 1974 Sears Christmas Wishbook and I got them on my 10th birthday, in November of 74.  I have taken them, and put them up, in every place I lived out west.  It was bittersweet bringing them full circle.

I grew up in this room.  When I was a baby, it had blue wallpaper with white dot flowers, and a dark blue wood floor with white, red and yellow paint splatters and dots.  When I was about 7, I was allowed to choose my own wall to wall carpet and I went right for the red shag.  My parents were horrified and tried to steer me towards something more practical.  Um no.  Red shag till the day I finally moved out in the mid 80s after college.  After I moved, they gutted it to the studs and put in hardwood floors. I got an area rug for it.  I looked for red shag but sadly couldn't find any.  I wasn't allowed to have anything on the walls till I was in 9th grade.  Of course I went overboard which pissed off my mother cause she said I could put 'a couple' things on the wall.  I still remember my dad in the hallway laughing so hard at what I'd done and saying to her, 'Did you really expect her to just put a couple of things up?'  He really did know me so much better than she did.

So why would I let my decorating in 2019 be any different.

I've done a few things in the room that existed when I was a teenager.  That poster on the white door is ELO, from their 'Out of the Blue' album.  That door was the only place I could put anything before I was finally allowed to decorate the whole room. 

My old dollhouse, which I got for Christmas in approximately 1970, was out in the coop gathering cobwebs for the past 40 years.  The furniture, which came from the old Yield House store in the 70s, was in a box in the house so I put it back in the space where it was in elementary school.

You can't really see it, but above the peace sign on the door is a little plastic plaque that says 'Joanne's Room'.  I was surprised to find it in one of my storage boxes that have been sealed up since I lived in California.  

I wanted the futon in there cause I'm hoping to use the room as a nice little reading spot upstairs now that it's not so hot up there.  

The neon sign is 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' which is a parody of Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' which is on the slanted ceiling right above it.

Above the door is a Niagara Falls pennant I got in 1975, which hung in that spot when I was a kid.

Same thing with the Narnia poster on the side of the closet door.  And I'm pretty sure my Emerson pennant was in that spot as well.

Looking inside the 'long closet' in my room...that odd door with the slanted top.  It was used to store Christmas decorations when I was growing up.  Now it's got most of my purses, 45 records and cassette tapes.  Those posters were just way too big for any of the walls so sadly they had to go up in the closet.

This was the linen closet 'back in the day'

Now it's one of my bookshelves.  I have book shelves in almost every room of the house.

That is also an original 60s era towel which I've had since then too.  I can't believe it didn't get tossed out years ago but I laid claim to it back in the 80s when I discovered that we still had it.