Hi Everyone, welcome to Green Plum Design. My name is Ros Wyatt and I live right across the bay from San Francisco. I am an interior decorator and a screen printer and this is my first ever blog entry!
So what’s it all about? Well, in slightly over-sized nutshell, this blog is a celebration of interesting design, the ugly truth about re-modeling our house, the love of a quick lick of paint, being homesick for England while falling in love with California and a long and uphill battle to keep life simple.
Not so long ago I was living in a tiny village in the Derbyshire Dales in the heart of the English countryside… just me, my lovely husband, two children, a dog and lots of green fields and bleating sheep ….fast forward a handful of years and a very long story later and we are living in a little wooden beach cottage over-looking the San Francisco Bay…no complaints there…
So it was pretty small when we first moved in, just a little two bedroom bungalow when it boiled down to it – but it had the worlds most lovely light shining through every window and a spacious view of the sea and the city to compensate for it’s size.
Plus every room had wide tongue and groove wooden panels that made me want to weep.
When baby number three came along, we were really feeling the squeeze and so we made our home a little bigger and we now have an upstairs to our name. Wow, that was so easy to write, I am going to have to say it again…we now have an upstairs to our name. So quick and effortless to tap that in but anyone who has ever added a floor to their house and packed up and moved out, bitten their nails to the bone about the cost and dealt with the planning-permit-people knows a different story. Even now, after a good five years, when I think of that little patch of life, living in another house with a tiny baby, dreading the rain during the flimsy-tarp-on-the-roof-weeks and the constant-stream-of-hefty-bills-months, I catch my breath. And the worry, the nail biting worry over money and what we had committed ourselves to when there was clearly no going back…
Ahh, let’s not go there now… back to the bit about an upstairs …in this little part of California, bungalow living is par for the course ( what with earthquakes and all ) but boy, did I miss going upstairs to bed. It was all part of going to sleep for me, making that final upward traipse, picking up the odd pile of clothes from the bottom stair and then making a final glance down the stairs again before turning off the lights….
For our first few years here, I just took about three steps from our sitting room to our bedroom which was handily located right next door. Actually, it was down one step. It just didn’t feel right. After years of conditioning, I found myself trying to get into upstairs mode while I was still downstairs…Who’d have thought I’d miss it so much?
Moving back in held no end of pleasures for me but one of the biggest was the stairs. So here they are, all sixteen of them…
So here I am now, settled back in, tiny baby now in kindergarten and I am able to work more doing what I love the most – interior decorating, simplifying, organizing and helping people make their home the place they want it to be.
I thought I would put together this blog to share, among other things, how this house evolved and how I have slowly made it the place I want to be – not just a house but as a newcomer to this country, my home.
So here is the first of many ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures. This is the back of our little house, all knocked about with what turns out to be quite a small pile of rubbish and debris beside…it got, oh so much bigger…
and quite some months later….wait for it…
Now how is that for a satisfactory ‘before’ and ‘after’? Plenty more where that came from, so keep tuning in. And don’t you just love those “fried egg” poppies we have growing in our back garden? Matilija Poppies to those in the know.
And here is one more…there’s the tarp, ripped and torn from that years record breaking rain and wind…
And the following summer…
And one final look at the dust and rubble for now…
And the back garden now with a few quiet places to sit…
So that’s it, my first ever blog entry. I’ll be back very soon to give you more on the inside…but meanwhile I am off to paint some very tatty wooden panels that run along the side of the house…If you want to hear and see more, please do subscribe and I would love to hear any comments just so I know that you are out there! See you soon,
Ros