The Highs and The Lowes of Home Ownership

Our pink house is featured in the current issue (May/June) of Wilmington Magazine. You can pick up a copy and check it out for yourselves at these locations. Or, visit our press page for a sneak peek. Seeing our home in print, as photographed by the talented Leslie Koehn, was both gratifying and motivating. One of my long-term desires has been to have a home that is featured in a national shelter publication like Country Home or Country Living magazine, so it was exciting to view this article as a harbinger of even bigger things to come. A definite high! My Mom was so proud she sent copies to dozens of our relatives and family friends.

But my vision of what this building can become is far from complete. I keep an extensive list of goals and desires, and many of them home-improvement based. Consequently, I viewed our house photos with a critical eye, making note of all of the projects we still have to complete. Realizing how far we are from achieving the true potential of this space has me hankering for a hardware-store shopping spree.

When I give tours of our home, I often tell visitors about my desire to have French doors in our bedroom that look out onto our "secret garden" space. I half-jokingly say: "The day you see us on the Food Network, you will know that I have French doors in my bedroom."  Here are just a few more of the home-improvement goals on my current desires list:

- Adding Crown moulding to our bedroom and to the small sitting room at the back of the house.

- Finding a way to mount the unusual headboard that I bought at an antique store more than a year ago. It's a massive, heavy piece that will look perfect in our Master bedroom - once we find a solution to display it. This is such a challenge, three different professionals have refused to take on the project. I'm not giving up, though!

- Restoring the old dresser in our powder room and painting it a shiny, ebony black.

- Building a library wall in the sitting room.

- Finding and framing old photographs of the building, from its days as a luncheonette.
- Framing the sepia photo of my favorite Parisian boulangerie (I want to frame it with wood that looks like the charred planks used to bake bread in the wood-burning oven this particular boulangerie still used).

- Installing goldenrod-yellow gingham roman shades that will offset the plaid curtains in the sitting room.

- Creating an outdoor room at the back of our house, reminiscent of those found in old French farmhouses or villas.

- Repainting the ceilings in every room but one.

- Moving our fence to match our property line.