We’ve been doing a little home improvement around the Songer house lately. Coming into the process we each had our own ideas about what would best compliment the space and really represent us as a family, thus we have each selected our own areas of the house to update. For my part, I decided to focus on the master bedroom and bathroom. I repainted both rooms, replaced the ceiling fan and the outdated light fixture, (with Chris’ help of course) put up a few shelves and added some candles and silk flowers for ambiance. I also may or may not have put several quarter sized holes in the wall in the process (one due to a perfectly innocent misunderstanding about what “drill into the stud” meant, and another due to a blind rage brought on by a loose towel rack that had been tightened at least three times.) You won’t be seeing the finished product on HGTV or anything, but its an improvement none the less.
Bingley’s approach to decorating was a bit more artistic in nature. He feels that in order to create a true sense of flow in an opulent estate such as ours, one must bring a taste of the outdoors in. He has achieved this goal in the family room by using the “writhing” technique. Each time we take him outside, he stashes tiny bits of grass, mulch and leaves in his fur, he then “writhes” around on the carpet in such a way that the debris becomes embedded deeply into the carpet creating a lovely marbleized look. He then shakes the remainder of his materials onto the hardwood entryway and stairs, giving one the feeling of walking along a heavily wooded trail…in our living room. The entire process is just so organic and haphazard that its beautiful. He’s really a bit like Jackson Pollock, if Jackson Pollock had the ability to lick his own butt.
Corbin, not surprisingly, has chosen the upstairs area for his renovations. His ideas for the space involve a sort of organized, or even disorganized chaos in which one can create and explore. His first task was to challenge the sense of function and tradition that previously existed in the space by pulling all of the games and VHS tapes off of the office area shelves and arranging them in a maze like configuration on the floor. (Who still has a shelf of VHS tapes you may be asking yourself…the Songers, that’s who.) Corbin’s decorating style really involves all of the senses. Forgoing the oh so overused scents of vanilla or lavender, Corbin has chosen to use whole milk drippings on the carpet and Huggies “surprise sachets” in his bedroom to immediately invoke one’s sense of smell as they enter the space. He has also appealed to the sense of touch by rubbing bits of bread and cracker crumbs all over the bonus room furniture. The gritty, grainy texture of the room now gives one the sense of being on the beach, or in the bottom of a box of Cheerios.
Being the man of the house, Chris settled on the garage as his space. Now as many of you know, my husband is an artist who is currently working in the field of web design. Calling on his design background, Chris chose to utilize a sense of “perfect balance” in order to create a zen-like atmosphere in the garage. For instance, in front of our two cars, he has placed two lawn mowers, facing one another. Its like a perfect mirror image. Except that one of them is more that 30 years old and doesn’t work. On one side of the lawn mowers he has placed two table saws (never used) facing one another. On the other side he has placed two outdated, unusable computers, which, it seems relevant to mention, have been acquired from various friends and family members with the promise to turn the relics into servers or slave drives. These dominant elements are flanked on either side by a series of equally numbered, half empty paint cans, tool boxes and automobile related items. The one major design challenge that Chris faced in his space was that he only had one broken weed eater to hang on the far wall. But never one to shy away from a challenge, he decided to improvise. Our next door neighbor, Fernando, had a broken old weed eater that Chris convinced him he could fix. So now the borrowed broken weed-eater hangs proudly next to its partner…the owned broken weed eater. Perfect balance has been achieved. Its zen, its equilibrium, its messy and completely dysfunctional, but hey, I didn’t choose the garage so I don’t get to complain.