I?d been on the fence about having kids, and one of the reasons I?d wavered for so long was the stuff I?ve always been a decorator. Once I had my own room as a child, it became a family joke that I tried to fit an entire house?s worth of decor into my modest space. I certainly took care with every element?in my teens I had a friend paint daisies on my wall, while I stenciled ?Don?t you think that daisies are the friendliest flower",? a quote from You?ve Got Mail.
At 29, when I set out to buy my first home in Eastern Washington, I knew what I wanted it to look like: lots of light, something with character, a fenced backyard so that I could get a dog, a kitchen with potential.
Finding my house was a little like falling in love, in the most cliched way. Even before I?d seen the whole thing, I was yelling down the stairs for my real estate agent to make an offer. The house had honey-colored wood floors, built-in china cupboards in the dining room, and one of those old telephone tables in the hall. Everything was bathed in natural light. I waited on tenterhooks until I was sure it could be mine. I spent the next couple of years decorating?haunting my favorite consignment shops for midcentury modern pieces, taking my massive curved 1930s couch out of storage and lying at full length on its gray velvet surface. I?d pick up a 1950s floor lamp here, a secondhand stressless armchair there, a lucite chandelier on clearance. Once I had my tulip dining table with matching ...