[me surfing the internet]
I have yet to take down my big fat Christmas tree. Instead of doing that I’ve been wandering around in a fog trying to remember why I even exist and what my name even is. Sometimes it appears to be ‘Mater,’ (that’s Latin for ‘mom’ I’ve been childsplained) other times the simple, plain, yet condescending ‘Mother.’ So far I’ve escaped the scraping ‘Yeeessss Master’ that other children from church have adopted. Is that from Harry Potter? I need to read more.
So the tree is still up, and plums if I can think of a good time to take it down. It’s too much trouble anyway, especially when there are more interesting things to think about, like house trends for 2019. Smart homes are in, of course, say all the people being bought off by Amazon, and also mixed metals. I’m having a hard time envisioning that one. Maybe it just means that my 80s brass fireplace surround is back in. These ‘trends’ surprise me not at all. Nor does the fact that paint color fashions have changed. Bold accents are in, they say, and when you click on this exciting announcement, you discover we really have gone all the way back to, wait for it, 80s coral. That would be a grand big No. But I get it, paint color trends have to change so that you have to redo your house every thirty seconds. Which is why we have to have Kon Mari.
All these important house-decorating tips come from a website called PureWow which incidentally, when you click on it, asks if you want to subscribe and maybe win $1000. To get the pop up to go away, you have to click, “No I don’t want $1000,” which really makes you stop and think for a minute. PureWow asked someone famous who, nevertheless, I had never heard of, what’s coming in and these were all his clever and expensive insights for the new year.
The most shocking one, though, was buried in amongst the rest and was this—I’ll just quote it, so you won’t think I’m lying.
Black Kitchens & Bathrooms: Switching up the color scheme of your kitchen or bathroom doesn’t have to be an all or nothing kind of affair. Berk suggests swapping out small accessories like cutlery or room accents for matte or glossy black versions for simple changes that pack a punch.
Or maybe not. If you’re Kon Mari-ing, you aren’t ‘swapping,’ you’re ‘throwing.’ And what if you like your bathroom the way it is? Why should some guy you never heard of cause you to rush out and buy a lot of matte black bathroom accessories? What if you have come to love the ones you have, or if you didn’t love them, you just went without? What are ‘bathroom accessories’ anyway?
I adore my now completely functional bathroom on account of the wall being fixed. Not only is the wall beautiful (I still need to take pictures) but the bathroom, with all its clean hot and cold water and vent where actual heat comes up from a well functioning and gracious furnace, is like living in some sort of dilapidated and romantic castle’s servants’ quarters. The room is very small, but so well arranged. The bits of plaster that fall gently to the ancient wood floor when you close the door too harshly—which sometimes you do when running away from the hoards down below—lend an industrial bohemian feel (I found that while salivating over Anthropologie bathroom accessories). I mean, I know at some point we’ll have to deliberately chip off all the plaster and put in something ghastly like drywall, but that will be a dark and sad day for me, because the bathroom as it is now—low lighted, Botticelli calendared, claw-foot tubbed—is so calming and nostalgic that if you come in with your black matte accessories I will burn you with the fierce angry heat of a thousand, not dollars, but suns.
2019 should be the year where we all do what we like with our houses and our clothes. The year we take our domestic lives back from “experts” whose survival depends on each of us buying yet more stuff to keep up with the times. Time is rushing away anyway, there’s no way to keep up with it.
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