Before and After

This is our house in Fort Davis, Texas.
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I know I've rambled a lot about this house, and about Fort Davis, but we were there this time last year, and I've been thinking about it a lot, and I miss it.

We bought the house in 2003, but we hadn't lived in in for any extended length of time until last winter - January 2008 - when our tenants moved out.

Our tenants had a lot of stuff, and covered every wall and surface, but when they moved out, it looked barren. And shabby. What it needed was a paint job, and quick. So, much to Mistah's dismay, we undertook that project. Painted every ceiling, every wall, every piece of molding, baseboard, trim, cabinet. Every closet. And actually, miraculously, agreed on all most of the colors we chose.

This is the "dining area" - the kitchen is over there on the right:

This room faces east and is full of light in the morning . . .

. . . especially after we painted it mystic maize. After that we called it the Sunshine Room.

A different angle, with a peek into the kitchen. This was taken before Handy Dad came out to visit (with, naturally, Mom), and changed out all our overhead light fixtures.

We painted the kitchen, too, even though it's boring ol' off-white. Whitewash, actually. And we also painted that wall - on the right, between the oven and the fridge in the foreground - mystic maize, just like the dining room.

The "old" loo got a splashy couple of coats of sombrero. Also known - to us, anyway - as Texas Longhorns Orange. "Hook 'em, Horns". I don't usually like orange, but I love this, and I love how it makes the white trim pop. I also painted the vanity, but can't remember the name of that color.

This was the "library", before.
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And here's the library after a nice treatment of pink free spirit. This is right before we moved out. It's really too bad we don't have a photo of the room after painting, while we were still living there, because it looked lovely. It was full of books (and lots of cheap bookcases we'd amassed), a nice wood table borrowed from our friend Elizabeth, and cool chairs borrowed from our friends Lonn and Dedie. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

Here's the dung heap clothes room.
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And here it is with a couple of coats of pink sand dune. I don't have an "after" photo until this pre-moving-out one, either. This room was always kind of a mess, though, because we had no dressers, so we just draped clothes on the motley crew of chairs we'd accumulated.

It's called a "shot-gun" house: the rooms all line up, one after another, in a straight line. So you can shoot a shotgun straight through it, should the need arise. It's also a total of about 36 square feet, but has 12 doors. And 12 doorways. With 2 sides each. That's a hell of a lot of trim.

And this is the front room, the addition, the room built years after the rest of the house, which has a high ceiling and a concrete floor, and one of the outside brick walls as its inside wall. It's our living room-slash-bedroom.
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It faces west, and is a beautiful place to be in the afternoon, especially once its walls got coated with chameleon.

Lok at that. That is a lot of doorways. That open door straight ahead is the "new" loo, but the walls are covered with what showers walls are covered with, so we couldn't paint it.

I really love that brick wall. Every night I lied down on my futon in this room, and every night I said, "I love this color." We nailed it.

And that's it. We painted the outside of the addition when we bought the place in 2003 - it was gray cement, so we painted it pink San Juan Hill.

That agave was just a pup when we got him. Isn't he handsome? He never needs painting, but he does need some weeding from time to time.

And Sleeping Lion Mountain, in all its perfection, never needs a thing.