The Irvin Room

Home is where one starts from.
T. S. Eliot

My new friend Jae emailed me some pictures of her home yesterday. The house she and her husband have been working on for some time. It is incredible - the differentiation between before and after. Truly amazing. Great job, lady!

Anyway it got me thinking that I haven't posted any shots of Freeman House lately, have I? So... allow me to again introduce the Irvin Room, named after the family who owned this house from 1914 until 1955-ish. (Miss Freeman was their "land manager", and boarded in this house as part of her pay until she could purchase it.) The Irvins were very, very well-to-do in this town - the fourth settled town in Texas. It's called the Irvin Room because postcards hinting at the possibility of a clandestine affair involving Mr. Richard Irvin, Sr., were found in the wall. Very interesting, I say...

The room itself has a small sitting room at its entrance (which is so close to being finished!), a sleeping room, and will eventually have a private deck and restored fireplace. Eventually. For now, it's the room in which I sleep. And read. And listen to the rain fall on stormy nights.

I have a cream and gold theme going in this room. It wasn't exactly planned, it just happened somehow. I'd never been drawn to these tones before. Anyway, I usually have bouquets and herbs on the nightstand and dresser, but not today. This is it at its barest and most unadorned. But it's beautiful at Christmas! Oh, and Thanksgiving! Well... Easter, too. I adore this room, even if I'm not tall enough to finish the "salon wall" thing I have going on above the bed.

This is the painting that hangs directly above the bed. In the case of an emergency, it's one of the five things I would grab before running out the front door. I found it in a nearby antique store, and I suppose it's what I planned the room around. Somehow the solitary figure making her way down the road and up to the house draws me in. To the best of my recollection I paid $10 for the thing - frame and all. I'll never part with it...

I really do need to grow a foot or two taller so I can straighten those picture frames and hang the others. To hang those I put a ladder on the bed because there was no way the bed was moving. It was like hammering atop stilts on a sidewalk of jello. I screeched and stretched and kept crashing down all over the bed and spilling nails all over the place. During one collapse I dropped my beloved picture, which explains the cracked frame. I kept getting really mad but it was so funny that I ended up crying. Gaw. I'm such a girl.

So, there you have it. A room tour. Soon the floors and baseboards will be refinished and I'll be showing you dozens of pictures of nothing but wood. We both know I will.


Oh! Two things before I forget. One: thanks, Jolene, for the beautiful present. I intended to use it in the library, but in the meantime I'm using it as a temporary and fancy jewelry box. Hope you don't mind!

And two: this is what the Irvin Room looked like before renovation. It was one of the home's three kitchens. But not anymore. Progress, my friends. Every day a little bit of progress....