i love crackly and worn paint. i can't think of a time when i haven't. i love the texture. i love the faded color of old paint. i love the sense that it's been there forever. we have to paint our house this summer. we should have painted it last summer. but i am afraid for it to feel too crisp and fresh and new. i doubt it could ever look or feel too new. but i hate losing it's authentic time worn feel. the crooked front door we bought at an architectural salvage place has never been painted by us. i love it's patina so we left it the pale butter yellow that i would never have chosen for a door but i love it more than i can say.
i am happily very busy in the studio this week.

we spent the day in other people's houses today. houses being sold by the bank. or that had been left as part of an estate. houses empty and alone. in one we were afraid to walk up the stairs it was so structurally questionable. and in a couple the walls were bare lathe with the plaster torn away. there were parks and a river. schools. beautiful tree lined streets. rhubarb filled gardens. old wood soaked with life. paint that is chipped and worn. spaces i immediately make warm and happy in my mind. the anticipation and the possibilities swirl in an endless loop of aesthetic battles. i need to maintain the old, the charm, the integrity. and yet make it fresh and appealing in the honesty of it's bones. we haven't found the right house yet, or maybe we have.

houses visit me long after i visit them. i remember little areas and details that i hope will never change. when a house shows me her old iron heating grates and thick plank floors and high chipped baseboards and tall gracious ceilings and porcelain bathroom fixtures, my heart is captured. i re-enter these houses in my mind and i walk through them. i smell the odd old smells and hear the echoey creaks. chipped paint and ugly wallpaper. cracked linoleum and crumbling plaster. i want it all. i do want to see the restored beauty. i do want to see the rooms bulge with pride and a personal raison d'etre. but the aged tale it weaves around me in it's cracked and crumbling state is the rarer story i prefer. but i realize the miss haversham in me is peeking up as it always does, waiting just barely under my skin, testing me and taunting me. i know that to save a house is to hide the toughest parts of it's story. but if i can edit and re-work and coax the telling so the story stays in tact and is able to add chapter after chapter as it continues to warm and feed and bed it's families, it's story is a truer one.