Happily Homeless

For at least the next 3 months we will be homeless. Our house has been rented to some (fingers crossed) nice tenants and we are staying with family in LA until we leave in May. When we get to London we still have to find a place to rent so I imagine there will be more couch surfing with family. Not so easy when it's a family of four. 

All this in the name of adventure. Anything is better than a boring life, I keep telling my kids. Then I go to the bathroom and cry and think, holy s*** what have I done?? We sold all our stuff, we're pulling them out of school, leaving careers that are going quite well...

 As my eleven year old might say (and I only ever say in jest) - OMG.

Despite our current feeling of nervousness, it is nice to temporarily be living simply. All our belongings are on their way to London, we have limited amounts of clothing and none of the usual stuff that clutters up our lives. As a result I've been able to spend less time cleaning and organizing said stuff and more time actually doing things. In the past couple of days we had a trip to the Getty Center Museum, the Science Museum, and the Farmer's Market in Highland Park.

Anyway, how's this for unstyled?

Aaaahh. Nothing like an empty house to make my kids want to skate around with just their socks on. I think they had the best time in that house in those last few weeks - when it was empty. 

Mental note: don't clutter up with a bunch of junk in London. (Oh, but it's so hard sometimes when the junk is so pretty).

Coming soon:

Blog posts that are not about my personal life. I promise. Interesting styling stuff coming up.

Loft Revamp

Here's a sneak peek of a new space I've recently designed. 

It's a loft/mezzanine room that overlooks the living room of a house in Mount Washington - you climb 45 stairs  (I counted) to get to the home so it's like a little treehouse. 

The homeowner is an older woman with a great collection of vintage and new pieces that just needed to be tied together. It's a bonus room in the home, with french doors opening onto a nice balcony, and no real designated purpose. To reach it you have to climb a set of stairs that are almost vertical so getting large items up is tricky (no wonder the homeowner stays so fit with all this stair climbing).

Before:

In the bottom left of the picture above, you can see the opening where you climb up from the room below. 

I thought I was going to paper the wall behind the bed with a patchwork of wallpaper scraps. It ended up not working out. Instead I did this.

After:

Chalkboard paint up to where the ceiling starts. I added a fifth floral "painting" by drawing one in chalk. I like odd numbers of things and four paintings wasn't looking right.

On the opposite wall, I re-painted her white dressing table, made a little patchwork wall covering and hung some handmade bunting. 

It's a very cool space, and lovely when the french doors are open.

I'm eventually doing the rest of this house - those yellow walls are going...

Moving on

We've been planning it for months, but finally the time has come for us to move out of our lovely house.

We're moving to London in a few months, but we're renting out our house early and staying with family until we leave. I've had the hardest month of my life: showing my house to potential tenants - and keeping it immaculate at all times, doing repairs on the house, selling everything - we're not taking any big pieces except a couple of very special things, compiling heaps of paperwork for my husband's UK visa, and on and on and on...

Here are some images from the past couple of weeks:

We ended up having two consecutive weekends of yard-sales.

Red TV console - sold!

These cardboard boxes meant for packing have been played in, drawn on, and built into towers.

My son packing things to go in his "sootcase".

My daughter giving me a yoga/ballet lesson the other day. I was the most stressed I've ever been and it felt like my head was going to explode.

Only a few more days of madness.