oh my gosh. thank you for mentioning the ubiquitous gray design saturating everything. I HATE IT. i remember jokingly coming up with a zillow drinking game of take a shot every time you see a “renovated” home and its interior is entirely gray. you’d be passed out in 30 minutes. there’s some house flipper invading my town who buys the affordable homes, renovated them (gray), and sells them for 100k more a few months later.
we found my place by accident. i remember being drunk on a boat with my best friend and saying “i think we’re going to go look at this place. just for fun.” it was very much not gray. a 120+ year old textile mill converted into living spaces. i have three enormous south-facing windows, 14 ft ceilings (maybe? idk. they’re high. like i want to dust the exposed wooden beams but i need to buy a specialty ladder high) and crumbly exposed brick. i found out the first night i slept in it that the ceiling expands and contracts with the temperature changes. it makes a startling cracking sound. sometimes it’s like someone busting through a door. sometimes it’s like someone popping their stiff back. sometimes it travels from east to west down the house. when i kept waking up from it that first night, i texted my boyfriend about it and he said, “well, you wanted charm.” i’m mostly used to it by now (and so is my dog). i feel like i am becoming more myself here in this space; growing like the house plants that thrive with all this natural light, and my growing pains marked by the cracking of the ceiling. charm over gray all day, every day, even with the quirks.
Mar 27, 2022·edited Mar 27, 2022Liked by Kelton Wright
I’m so glad I found your Substack - I yell pretty much every thing you’ve said about HGTV to my tv screen when I have that faulty addictive crap playing in my house. The property brothers, ugh. My favourite thing to hate in the Midwest home idiom is fucking ‘GATHER’ signs or ‘FAMILY’ and especially if it’s in what I call bridesmaid font.
You’ve found a real treasure and I can’t wait to keep reading about your next steps with Shangrilogs.
I’ve skipped the Subscriber channels on tv in the last year and follow a bunch of people on YouTube. My favourite new addiction is a chick named Kylie Flavell who has Aussie roots, and muscles galore. She’s renovating a Tuscan ruin with her unfeasibly good looking husband, cooking slow and doing just about everything herself. Once you start watching that kinda stuff YouTube does the rest, throwing out all kinds of off the beaten track homes to marvel and imagine at.
"When Joanna Gaines puts a giant metal sign that says FAMILY like she's Dominic Toretto?" Girl-- I literally said GURRRRL because we are friends in my head-- I laughed so hard when I read this. OMG! Home shows are my comfort food too. (I also watch way too much Guy Fieri that I feel my arteries are suffering from the visuals of all those fat-soaked dishes in those little diners that I so miss.) But, yes, all that hateful grey. I have never loathed grey so much as after watching an episode of the Property Brothers. Dear God. But back to you, I do love your house. And I love the look of your old home in California too. Your writing and those epic plants in your house are what sold me on making Shangrilogs my Sunday read. The plants love that you love them too, btw. How do I know? Fellow flora/fauna talker here. The plants sent a message to me on the wind. They love you. Thanks for a great read and the laughs!
Kelton, this is so on point with my inner dialogue it HURTS. Hurts so good to feel validated by another human seeking the real character in things like our homes. Screw the grey!
Aug 8, 2022·edited Aug 8, 2022Liked by Kelton Wright
We paid $84,000 for our fixer in 2020, put about $30,000 into it, a 100 plus yr old cute home - and my coworkers are paying $400,000 for the builder grades with NO TREES - and huge property taxes - meanwhile, we are sitting here under giant neighborhood trees that support an entire ecosystem (including a fox and nine bird families) with our $700/mo house payment in a 15 yr mortgage like…oh you dont diy?!
Nothing’s as quiet as the mountain tho. And these 20 plus huge pre-AC windows are perfect for climate change.
Omg yes. The only thing I really miss from the big house I sold years ago was all the plants. I had 50+ house plants and many of them were very large. I had a big house, no kids, no pets - so much room for plants! I put in better windows so the plants had better light and the house could get airflow (what is with windows that don’t open??). When I sold it the first thing the realtor said was we had to pair back the plants so people could see the house. I had also built several raised garden beds in the yard after ripping out a lot of sod. There was so much room to plant wonderful things. An entire herb garden. Blueberry bushes I had painstakingly raised that were finally mature and fruiting. Blackberry bushes. A hedge row near the sidewalk of butterfly bushes. I drove by there a couple years ago - it’s all gone. They ripped out the raised beds and put in sod. I have no idea why they ripped out the butterfly bushes. I guess they wanted an open yard. :( And I almost forgot - when I moved into that house in 2001, it was all gray. I didn’t notice it when I was looking at it because it was a model house and they had all white furniture. When I moved my very colorful furniture in it was so drab! The first winter I painted the whole thing yellow (which was no easy feat with high ceilings).
Then I rented a tiny, old, brick house for about 5 years. The house was crap but it had a “sun room” on the back with double doors to a small deck. It was an old neighborhood with mature trees and my bird feeders were full. It was a delightful office, even if it was cold, because I could watch the birds and the chipmunks all day. When I moved out, the landlord painted the red brick GRAY. It now looks like a prison. It was horrendous! I would never ever have rented it if it had been that color!
You’ve outlined many of the reasons I stopped watching home improvement shows years ago.
man. you just read my mind for the last two yrs. we live in texas, i grew up parttime near telluride. we are fixing up a literal fixer upper that could be on that show and I wanted to see what it was like and the shows - I cannot watch them anymore bc I realize how fake they are - the ppl dont care about these houses and the character they rip it down most of the time and ive come to the conclusion that these shows have inflated the property market somehow bc everyone is speaking in real estate terms and wants to fix something up. Well, kudos to you fellow true fixer - one who knows what to fix and what not. My family is getting sick of me bitching about HGTV. UGH.
I had never had the thought before that a house with character is a house with problems ( and problems build character). I love this! And I love my problematic 1934 Tudor style cottage - you couldn't pay me to live in boring new construction...
PS-When my parents moved into our house in '66, it had four giant, amazing Thuja (maybe?) bushes and two gorgeous maple trees in front of the house. Only one of the maples is still standing...Desertification...
Got a lot of heart, your home does, but I do have a question: do those vine thingies really grow up into the attic/onto the roof?? That's awesome. Elementally strong, she is (your house).
I really enjoyed this and related to it (except the home TV shows, I never got into those, only cabin porn Instagram when designing our house). You gave me the push I needed to finally get rid of the fake plant we have that's left over from a photo shoot in our house. It kind of blends in but then I focus on it and wonder, why do I have this? I think I will leave it at the Free Box tomorrow. thank you!
oh my gosh. thank you for mentioning the ubiquitous gray design saturating everything. I HATE IT. i remember jokingly coming up with a zillow drinking game of take a shot every time you see a “renovated” home and its interior is entirely gray. you’d be passed out in 30 minutes. there’s some house flipper invading my town who buys the affordable homes, renovated them (gray), and sells them for 100k more a few months later.
we found my place by accident. i remember being drunk on a boat with my best friend and saying “i think we’re going to go look at this place. just for fun.” it was very much not gray. a 120+ year old textile mill converted into living spaces. i have three enormous south-facing windows, 14 ft ceilings (maybe? idk. they’re high. like i want to dust the exposed wooden beams but i need to buy a specialty ladder high) and crumbly exposed brick. i found out the first night i slept in it that the ceiling expands and contracts with the temperature changes. it makes a startling cracking sound. sometimes it’s like someone busting through a door. sometimes it’s like someone popping their stiff back. sometimes it travels from east to west down the house. when i kept waking up from it that first night, i texted my boyfriend about it and he said, “well, you wanted charm.” i’m mostly used to it by now (and so is my dog). i feel like i am becoming more myself here in this space; growing like the house plants that thrive with all this natural light, and my growing pains marked by the cracking of the ceiling. charm over gray all day, every day, even with the quirks.
I’m so glad I found your Substack - I yell pretty much every thing you’ve said about HGTV to my tv screen when I have that faulty addictive crap playing in my house. The property brothers, ugh. My favourite thing to hate in the Midwest home idiom is fucking ‘GATHER’ signs or ‘FAMILY’ and especially if it’s in what I call bridesmaid font.
You’ve found a real treasure and I can’t wait to keep reading about your next steps with Shangrilogs.
I’ve skipped the Subscriber channels on tv in the last year and follow a bunch of people on YouTube. My favourite new addiction is a chick named Kylie Flavell who has Aussie roots, and muscles galore. She’s renovating a Tuscan ruin with her unfeasibly good looking husband, cooking slow and doing just about everything herself. Once you start watching that kinda stuff YouTube does the rest, throwing out all kinds of off the beaten track homes to marvel and imagine at.
"When Joanna Gaines puts a giant metal sign that says FAMILY like she's Dominic Toretto?" Girl-- I literally said GURRRRL because we are friends in my head-- I laughed so hard when I read this. OMG! Home shows are my comfort food too. (I also watch way too much Guy Fieri that I feel my arteries are suffering from the visuals of all those fat-soaked dishes in those little diners that I so miss.) But, yes, all that hateful grey. I have never loathed grey so much as after watching an episode of the Property Brothers. Dear God. But back to you, I do love your house. And I love the look of your old home in California too. Your writing and those epic plants in your house are what sold me on making Shangrilogs my Sunday read. The plants love that you love them too, btw. How do I know? Fellow flora/fauna talker here. The plants sent a message to me on the wind. They love you. Thanks for a great read and the laughs!
Kelton, this is so on point with my inner dialogue it HURTS. Hurts so good to feel validated by another human seeking the real character in things like our homes. Screw the grey!
We paid $84,000 for our fixer in 2020, put about $30,000 into it, a 100 plus yr old cute home - and my coworkers are paying $400,000 for the builder grades with NO TREES - and huge property taxes - meanwhile, we are sitting here under giant neighborhood trees that support an entire ecosystem (including a fox and nine bird families) with our $700/mo house payment in a 15 yr mortgage like…oh you dont diy?!
Nothing’s as quiet as the mountain tho. And these 20 plus huge pre-AC windows are perfect for climate change.
Omg yes. The only thing I really miss from the big house I sold years ago was all the plants. I had 50+ house plants and many of them were very large. I had a big house, no kids, no pets - so much room for plants! I put in better windows so the plants had better light and the house could get airflow (what is with windows that don’t open??). When I sold it the first thing the realtor said was we had to pair back the plants so people could see the house. I had also built several raised garden beds in the yard after ripping out a lot of sod. There was so much room to plant wonderful things. An entire herb garden. Blueberry bushes I had painstakingly raised that were finally mature and fruiting. Blackberry bushes. A hedge row near the sidewalk of butterfly bushes. I drove by there a couple years ago - it’s all gone. They ripped out the raised beds and put in sod. I have no idea why they ripped out the butterfly bushes. I guess they wanted an open yard. :( And I almost forgot - when I moved into that house in 2001, it was all gray. I didn’t notice it when I was looking at it because it was a model house and they had all white furniture. When I moved my very colorful furniture in it was so drab! The first winter I painted the whole thing yellow (which was no easy feat with high ceilings).
Then I rented a tiny, old, brick house for about 5 years. The house was crap but it had a “sun room” on the back with double doors to a small deck. It was an old neighborhood with mature trees and my bird feeders were full. It was a delightful office, even if it was cold, because I could watch the birds and the chipmunks all day. When I moved out, the landlord painted the red brick GRAY. It now looks like a prison. It was horrendous! I would never ever have rented it if it had been that color!
You’ve outlined many of the reasons I stopped watching home improvement shows years ago.
The plants! My eyes are obsessed with these plants!
man. you just read my mind for the last two yrs. we live in texas, i grew up parttime near telluride. we are fixing up a literal fixer upper that could be on that show and I wanted to see what it was like and the shows - I cannot watch them anymore bc I realize how fake they are - the ppl dont care about these houses and the character they rip it down most of the time and ive come to the conclusion that these shows have inflated the property market somehow bc everyone is speaking in real estate terms and wants to fix something up. Well, kudos to you fellow true fixer - one who knows what to fix and what not. My family is getting sick of me bitching about HGTV. UGH.
I had never had the thought before that a house with character is a house with problems ( and problems build character). I love this! And I love my problematic 1934 Tudor style cottage - you couldn't pay me to live in boring new construction...
PS-When my parents moved into our house in '66, it had four giant, amazing Thuja (maybe?) bushes and two gorgeous maple trees in front of the house. Only one of the maples is still standing...Desertification...
Got a lot of heart, your home does, but I do have a question: do those vine thingies really grow up into the attic/onto the roof?? That's awesome. Elementally strong, she is (your house).
I really enjoyed this and related to it (except the home TV shows, I never got into those, only cabin porn Instagram when designing our house). You gave me the push I needed to finally get rid of the fake plant we have that's left over from a photo shoot in our house. It kind of blends in but then I focus on it and wonder, why do I have this? I think I will leave it at the Free Box tomorrow. thank you!