Enchanted

This is the last of the tour of "rooms in my house." It's the kitchen, which is at the far end of the big open room with the dining table in the middle and the TV and couch at the other end.

It's orange.


It's very dated, with its white appliances and pine cabinets. I like it, though, and have no plans to update anything. I love the colors and I like the old fashioned cottage look.

Other than the rabbit that came with us from New England, I am not planning on putting anything over the cabinets, although there is lots of space up there. I like the open, clean, unfussy look, so I won't be putting any dust catcher decor on top of the cabinets.


The room is functional and well laid out, with plenty of light from two south / west windows and a full glass door.

I like looking out the kitchen door to the gate to our courtyard. The kitchen door faces east, so morning light pours in, lighting up the gate and entrance and it's just a small sight that pleases.


The gat…

We're getting things done.

   New window blinds have been put up.

   A garage door opener was installed and it makes coming and going easy now.

   We both have appointments set up with new doctors.

   We have been invited to a neighborhood block party.

We each have a New Mexico driver's license. The car is registered in New Mexico and we have new plates.


But the one thing we cannot accomplish is getting our first class mail forwarded. Despite multiple trips to the post office, multiple forms submitted, both hard copy and online, and a half hour call to a nice lady at the USPS help line, the best the postal service can tell us is "it isn't working and we don't know why".

If something is sent to our new address, it gets here just fine. But anything sent to our old address goes to random places -- sometimes to our old address despite the forwarding instructions, sometimes to General Delivery here in Santa Fe, and sometimes back to the sender.

We go to the post o…

We have window shades now. Roy and his son Levi came and installed the Hunter Douglas Duette honeycomb blinds we ordered when we first moved in. It took a while to get them, but it was worth the wait. This is so much better.


The dining room shades only go up to the transoms. We left the top part uncovered. When the shades are raised, you can't even tell there are any window treatments on these windows at all.


I like having the light and the open view all day. But at night we'll lower the shades and finally have some privacy.

On the sliding patio door that opens out to the road in front, we had a "vertiglide" shade installed. It's the same honeycomb fabric in the same color, and it works like a blind, only it slides to the left instead of up or down. The matching window has the top down bottom up feature.


Like the dining room windows, the slider shade can be opened to any width, and when it is fully open it virtually disappears.


We'll keep it open in the day, …

This is another in the series "rooms in my house". This is the master bedroom, and it's not orange. I know, I know. can you believe it?


It's really hard to photograph. The walls are a soft sage green, which is very soothing, but it photographs poorly, looking like pea soup. It really isn't that color.

From the front door you turn right and go down this hall. The doors on the right are the other bedrooms, and the double folding doors on the left are where the washer and dryer live. I love having them right outside the bedrooms.


That big sliding door has to be replaced, and we're not on the contractor's schedule until mid October. It barely closes, the seals in the panes are all shot, and it needs to be redone.  Until the door is replaced, I can't put up any window covering.


So the door is uncovered all day, letting lots of sun in, and all night, letting moonlight and dawn rosiness into the room. Although we are surrounded by other houses, the vine cove…

In the ongoing series "rooms in our house" I bring you the third installment: the TV room. It is simply one end of the big open room that goes from front to back and includes the dining room in the middle and the kitchen at the far end.


It is the room with the dark orange-red accent wall. It's where we watch TV and where household activities are attended to at the desk. The sliding patio door opens to the narrow portal on the front of the house, almost directly onto the street, actually.

When you enter the front door, it is to the left and around the corner a bit, so all you see at first is the couch lit by one of the big cottonwood-shaded windows on the east side.


We need window treatments. In the daytime the sunny view and the dappled shade are lovely, but at night, watching TV from that spot, we're pretty exposed.

Not a thing here is new, the lamps and furniture and rug and everything all came with us from Connecticut, including the Mexican blanket we had for some…

We packed a picnic supper, brought our folding chairs and arrived at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden in time for Thursday's sunset concert.

The Botanical Garden is lovely. It's small, and a little overly "done" (meaning a lot of carefully placed stonework and many seating areas and perfectly placed sculptures, all sort of over designed), but still, for a small and newish garden, it's nice.


The skies were cloudy, and there was a dampish breeze. It caught the lavender and tossed whiffs of beautiful scent at us as we walked by.


The concert band was Half Broke Horses, and to Jim's dismay they were a country band. The name should have tipped him off. Twang. But they were inside the covered pavilion and, along with some families and other couples, we set up our folding chairs on the vintage red bridge that crosses an arroyo, so we were far enough away that the twanging wasn't bad.


All good so far. Except there really wasn't a sunset this night. Every evening …

The light in Santa Fe is beautiful. It's what has always attracted artists here. There is something liquid, clear and enchanting about it at different times of day.

When I wake in the morning, about 6:30, I get a glimpse of sky from the big sliding glass door in the master bedroom. We have no window treatments yet, so all is open to the outside. The bedroom faces south and is surrounded by other houses, so there's just a bit of sky I can see from bed as dawn progresses.


But then, just as I roll over, the sun abruptly catches the corner of the house behind us and splashes golden paint on it.


The clean straight corners of the stucco style house reflect the sun sharply. It looks like an artist's stroke spreading out with intention across the top of the house.


I watch the sun create this canvas every morning. Even with my iPhone, through the door screen, lying in bed, it looks brilliant. In real life it is an incredible sight.


When it is time to get up, the picture is finished…

The dining room gets dappled light from two huge windows on the east side in the mornings and it's my favorite part of our new house.


It's really all one big, open room, with the kitchen on one end and the TV den on the other.


It shares a fireplace with the living room, which is on the other side of the half walls. It's a two way fireplace, so a blaze set in the living room on a winter's evening will be enjoyed at dinner too.


On this side of the fireplace I kept the mantel simple -- just some pitchers and the van Gogh needlework Hope stitched and framed for us.


In this house there is no separate kitchen breakfast area, this is the only dining table. So of course it's where everything gets done: reading the paper, all indoor meals, projects, discussions and more. It's the center of the house, the middle of the open space, so it's where everything happens.


The tile floors are attractive so I didn't put down a rug, and that makes for easy clean up and an u…

This is for Pam. I told her I was planning to use all our old furniture in the new house, and she was skeptical when I mentioned using the western-style twig porch furniture in the living room. In fact she was alarmed about it.

So this is for her -- here is the living room. It's the room you walk right into from the front door.


Everything is from our old house. Nothing new. It's obvious we need some art or something over the couch on that long blank wall, but other than filling that space, everything here is familiar and well used from Connecticut.

(A neighbor came over yesterday and said with some surprise, "wow, your New England furniture looks so . . . um, western.")

I particularly like the half-wall bookshelves and fireplace, where some of my most loved old items found a home. The fireplace is to the left as you enter from the front door. Rather than a single large painting in that tall space over the mantel, which is what the former owner had, I like the collect…