Adding Stuff

First, I put the stuff I had in the living room.

The time comes when most of your stuff is unpacked and you need a few new things to fill in and make the space come to life. I'm there.

I liked the way my sofa looked even though it filled the living room almost to its edges, but what passed for a coffee table was not quite sufficient. I needed something bigger, but not too big. I also needed a place to hang the water color my husband and I had bought in the 1980s of the cathedral in Geneva when we lived there.

The windows were nice with no covering at all, but at night the room was a fishbowl. Simple curtains had to be found for privacy, and these also did the job of adding a bit of color to the room. Craigslist offered a coffee table of just the right size, made of recycled palettes, polished and designed with an extra shelf for oversized books and undersized objects.

Curtains at the window, a favorite painting, and a new coffee table.

Bit by bit, by adding stuff I had and adding judiciously to it, the place in uptown Kingston is beginning to remind me of my whole life.

In the dining room, with its sea-colored wainscoting, I found a place for both the driftwood table my mother gave me 20 years ago, and a non-objective by the Philadelphia artist Ed Bing Lee that I've owned for some 30 years.

A driftwood table, accessorized.

I've got more corners and crannies to show you, but they will wait. This is the way the house is shaping up--old with new, reused with recycled, all combined in a house that needed love and attention for years. 

Ed Bing Lee's painting graces the dining room.