our humble villa

Help.

I am not an interior designer. It is possible that I could be an interior designer, because I can dream up the perfect room. What holds me back is that I am not a shopper. In fact, shopping produces a very strange anxiety in me that usually results in me getting nauseous and then deciding that I can live without whatever it is that I am shopping for and leaving the store refusing to spend a cent on anything.

Everything in our house, except for our beds, was either borrowed, purchased second-hand, or simply given to us. The same goes with most of my clothes. They are either from Ross or from a good friend. I just can't bring myself to spend money on things. I look at the price before I look at anything else. When I was in college, I would go to the grocery store and try to get what I needed while spending the least amount of money possible. Tony has helped be break this habit by convincing me that we need to eat, and we like to eat good food, so spending money on food is a necessity and an easy way to improve our quality of life. He taught me to just consider it as one of our bills. Now, I just load up the cart and close my eyes when I run the card through the money-taking device.



As you can imagine, then, I do not know how to shop or spend money to give some flare to a home. This particular home needs a lot of flare, because it is a lot of big, open space. This is the upstairs.


It is where we spend most of our time, and it is not comfortable to me. The thing that makes it the least comfortable is that there is not room for all three of us to sit together. When Tony and I sit on these two chairs, Graham crawls all over us and jumps from chair to chair until I finally just stand up and say, "Enough!" Then, I go hide under the covers and hope the room transforms itself overnight.



We have a couch downstairs that matches the two chairs. I am thinking of bringing it up, but I'm not sure where to put it. Plus, it is really heavy. Plus, then there would be nowhere to sit downstairs, which is where we put the TV for watching movies. Since we don't have network TV, Tony and I end up watching a few shows online, which means we sit in these two chairs and look at the computer together, which is never very comfortable. See, it's a problem.

We won't talk about the empty wall space, because I think I have a solution for that. Tony picked up a couple of paintings on canvas from Africa. They are currently being stretched onto a board so we can hang them up on the walls. I'll show you pictures when that happens.

In the meantime, please tell me. What would you do with this kitchen/dining/living-type-room-thing? Help! Oh, yes, and as you shout out all your wonderful ideas, please keep in mind that the walls are sort of diagonal. Does that even make sense??



Okay, so that's what I don't like about this space. The things I do like are: the natural light from the windows, the window above the sink, the fact that the windows are actually doors that lead to the patio, and, of course, I loooove the view I get to stare at all the time.

Oh, and here's a picture of our bathroom, where we spend a good amount of time, as well.




Stay tuned for more pictures of our villa. I'm working on getting each room clean enough to photograph!

Plus, taking pictures of rooms is quite difficult. More props to all those wonderful bloggers who blog about their homes and take good pictures of them.

This is tough business.