Priscilla's Workshop

 It is getting close to our one year anniversary living in this new/old house but we are still working to get everything together to furnish and decorate. Clearly the pandemic put a pause on some stuff but my own frugality has an impact on many decisions. 

 

My husband and I are already old as I have written many times before. We have been married more than fifty years and we have bought and sold many houses during that time while simultaneously amassing rooms full of furniture. We upsized and downsized multiple times depending on the house and the job. We had downsized drastically when we bought our last house in Salt Lake City thinking that it would be our last house to decorate. Our sons took beds, couches, rugs, art, etc. with our blessing. We went from a house that had 11 bedrooms to one that really only had three and one of those was on the first floor not what we thought of as the bedroom floor.

When we moved to Pennsylvania we thought that house was going to be our toes up/body bag house so its small size and the limited space didn't really matter. Then someone poisoned my dog and both my husband and I didn't want to live there any more. So we found our current space which looks much bigger than it is but it is certainly bigger than our body bag house.

Because of all of the serial downsizing, I ended up not having enough furniture for the new/old house but I did still have two couches and several occasional chairs. Once two couches and two chairs were reupholstered, most of the living room was good to go. But we are old folks without any relatives or friends in the area so furnishing the extra bedroom got put to the back burner. We have our bed and we worked very hard to get it here and in the room. We had to utilize the enormous loft door that was originally used for lifting hay bales into the hay mow but we also had to cut into an overhang to get the headboard down to the bedroom. Luckily I honed my plastering skills on a house about three houses back so filling in those holes was relatively easy.

Still there was one bedroom that didn't have furniture. Our previous house had three bedrooms with one of those serving us as the cats' bedroom and our library so it had bookcases and cat beds but not people beds. Given that I am old and given that I am seriously frugal, I didn't want to spend a great deal of money putting furniture in a room that neither my husband nor I would have much reason to go into but neither did I want it to be simply empty. My husband agreed that it just looked empty even though it had some furniture in it.

 

I found some early 19th century twin beds on Chairish.We installed them in this extra bedroom and now I will have a new project once I finish quilting the strange Baltimore Album that I have been working on. About ten years ago I made a Dresden Plate quilt that is twin bed size and now I will make a second, though not identical, Dresden Plate quilt for the second bed. (Edit: It turns out I made the Dresden Plate 7 years ago and there is a photo on July 26, 2013 on this blog. You can search using the date or just by entering Dresden Plate.) The beds are mahogany with carved posts so the quilts will suit the age of the beds and the room.

 

As an addendum--people who don't trust science should not be giving advice to the rest of us who live in the 21st century. Wear a mask, wash your hands, keep a social distance protocol, and vote blue.