Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jade's avatar

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.

Expand full comment
Honey Barbara's avatar

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.

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts