57 + 1 = 58

One more week - and one more pound. I weighed in at 136 this morning, for a total weight loss of 58 lbs. That mini-goal of 134 by Saturday, February 20 is just 2 lbs. away now. Can I do it? I'm certainly going to try!

This has been a lovely winter. My parents have been in town since late November and don't plan to head home to New England until early April --- which has been fantastic (it's such a treat to see them playing with Kitten and Poppet!), but it also makes my social calendar more full than it was during my first year of The Great Housekeeping Experiment. And when my social calendar is full, I feel like I'm always one step behind in my housework. I'm looking forward to making one of my vintage dinners for them one of these nights, though, and showing off some of my new cooking skills. Boy, won't they be surprised! I guess I ought to give some thought to the menu. Maybe I can plan a Washington's Birthday celebration or something...

One of the many things on my to-do list while my parents - and their truck! - are in town is to make my major furniture purchases for my nest: a sofa and a new mattress set. We're headed out this morning to do a little "market research." I haven't been furniture shopping in years, so it'll be good to see what's out there and get a feel for the prices. (It may take me a few trips like this just to get comfortable with the money I'm going to have to fork over. When you haven't spent a lot of money on any one thing in years, the idea can take some getting used to!)

Henry Humphrey's Woman's Home Companion Household Book (1948) offers some interesting advice on sofas:

To follow a good general rule, be sure that there are as many upholstered pieces as there are members of your family. Add to these a couch or sofa and there will be a comfortable seating arrangement for both family and guests. For large gatherings, provision will have to be made for extra chairs, probably taken from other parts of the house, so consider the upholstered pieces from the standpoint of comfort for your immediate family and the average number of people you entertain.

If there is no other accommodation for an overnight guest, the living room may occasionally have to substitute as a bedroom. For this purpose, a studio couch, or some type of couch which can be made into a bed, is a sensible investment.

If the guest bedroom problem does not concern you, the living room's upholstered furniture may be of any kind or type you like. There are all sizes and shapes of sofas; there are loveseats, couches, studio couches and chairs. Quality is important when buying. Flashy exteriors never make up for solid construction.

Okay, so if there's only one member in my family, then I only need one upholstered piece in my living room + a couch or sofa. Sweet! I'm halfway there. I already own an oversized club chair and ottoman covered in a burgundy velvet. I don't have any accommodations for overnight guests, but I rarely have overnight guests --- and now that my parents have a place out here which is going to be vacant half the year, you might say I have a guest room just across town. (Just kidding!) I would like to upgrade to a larger apartment at some point - one with a second bedroom for Kitten or Poppet to sleep in when they stay over at Auntie's - so while a sleep sofa might come in handy once in a great while, I probably wouldn't need it in my next place. I suspect sleep sofas are much more expensive than traditional sofas, but that's something I need to look into while I'm out shopping today. It's still on the table.

What do you suppose a "studio couch" is? As near as I can figure from the instructions in this book on slipcovering a studio couch, it's a flat piece you'd leave bolsters on during the day for seating and remove them at night to convert it into a bed of sorts. My great-aunt, who built and furnished a home in the 1940s with her husband, had two of these pieces on the sleeping porch. When my sisters and I were visiting, we'd take the bolsters off at night, pile them on the floor, then spread our sleeping bags on top. There were three of us and only two of the couches, so one unfortunate sister always ended up sleeping on the window seat. Luckily it was padded!

The living room in my apartment is not large, so size is key. I'm aiming at something about the size of a loveseat. And if I need a larger sofa in my next place one day, I'll still be able to get some use out of the smaller sofa in another room or as a second piece. I'm planning on something with a fairly neutral upholstery - maybe a medium tan or straw color - but who knows what'll strike my fancy. It probably won't be any of bright jewel tones popular in '40s upholstered furniture. Check out the blues and greens and violets in these vintage slipcover advertisements! You never know, though.



Here are the background colors I have to work around. My living room has wall-to-wall carpeting in a dingy apartment blue (think slate blue). The walls and woodwork are painted apartment beige. The window blinds I have to leave in place per my lease are apartment beige as well. My one upholstered chair is a deep burgundy.

I'll let you know how it goes! Thanks as always for making this blog a place where I can focus my thoughts and refine my plans. Y'all are the best!!!

20 + 1 = 21

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind. For those of you following my little reducing saga, you'll remember that two weeks ago I had to stop taking the diuretic I'd taken for the last couple years to help control my blood pressure. After losing 20 lbs., my blood pressure had dropped so low that I needed to begin stepping down on the meds, and the diuretic was the first to go. Within four days, I gained 4 lbs. in water weight. During the last 10 days, I've worked my patooty off and managed to lose not only 4 lbs. to compensate for the water weight but 1 more lb. to boot. And all the time I've continued drinking 64 oz. of water per day - the same amount of water I was drinking while I was taking the diuretic and the same amount I drank everyday last week --- so I'm feeling pretty confident that what I've lost this last week has been genuine poundage. At any rate, I weighed in at 173 this morning. We're back on the move, dear readers!

The red Mexican bird of paradise is now in bloom which means our long-winded desert summer is about halfway over --- it also means, unfortunately, that my little apartment is starting to smell very stuffy. I've tried to keep things sealed up in here since it became blazing hot in June. The windows are never opened and the door opened just long enough for me to exit or enter. I'm not sure what the cure for this midsummer stuffiness might be. Is there some secret none of the natives have filled me in on yet? It's too hot even in the middle of the night to crack the windows. Ah well, I guess I can endure the stuffiness for a couple more months.

The Woman's Home Companion Household Book (1948) has some wonderful suggestions for those seeking to cool their homes - in looks and in temperature - during summers in a pre-air conditioning world. Maybe these'll come in handy for you lucky dames living in a more temperate climate! It's fascinating to me how much more amenable people once seemed to adapting their decor to the season instead of fighting Mother Nature tooth and nail to keep things looking the same year-round. It was almost expected - either when you did your spring cleaning or about the time you put up your window screens - that you would switch out the furnishings, linens, and draperies throughout your home for the summer ahead.

The first few are very practical tips for cooling your home and circulating air:

• Closed windows and drawn blinds throughout the day will prevent sunshine and warm air from penetrating the house, as southerners learned long ago. Wait until the sun has left the horizon before opening windows and raising blinds to welcome any cool air the evening may bring. Opening upstairs windows and keeping the lower ones closed will permit the warm air, which has risen to escape.

• Electric fans put in action in strategic points throughout the house will keep the air in circulation... In front of the fan or fans, place a tray filled with chunks of ice - they will cool the air which is circulated by the fans.

• Evenings will be somewhat cooler if candles are substituted for electric lights.

• Sofas and chairs, which in the winter faced a cheerful fireside, should now be directly or obliquely in the path of any breeze the windows or doors may lure into the room.

These next two have the comfort of the housewife in mind:

• With an eye to relief from the burden of cleaning tasks, many housewives use a blanket cover instead of the traditional bedspread. A dressing table which has good lines can be left unskirted during the warm months.

• Summer is no time for laundering fine damask, babying fine crystal or polishing prized silverware. During the warm season, use only the simplest, most informal luncheon cloths and place mats.

This last series is all about "cooling" your decor:

• Bright slipcovers [examples: white with green ivy print or a floral print in blue, white and a bit of wine] rank high in importance among summer transformations. Not only do they play a part in cooling off the color scheme but they protect upholstery fabrics from the harm to which dust and sunshine streaming through summer-open windows expose them.

• Large rugs - Oriental, velvet broadloom, wool piles, etc. - deserve a professional cleaning annually and it is practical to send them out for cleaning and storage when the warm days arrive. Living room, dining room or bedroom floors left bare by their departure will look much cooler and will have a chance to display their own hardwood beauty.

• Use sheer white fabrics to make cool, filmy summer curtains to replace warm winter draperies.

• In place of the usual kindling wood and logs, pile laurel or pine branches across the andirons and in the woodbasket. For a more dramatic change, store the andirons, etc., and set a big potted plant or basket of greens in their place.

• Wooden bowls... are nice for serving rolls, fruits and vegetables, as well as salads.
  
  
• This is the time to use vegetable-shaped soup bowls, leaf-shaped serving dishes. Hunt out amusing salt and pepper shakers and relish dishes of all kinds. Have pottery vivid in hue - in one solid tone or colors which combine.

Turning a Bedroom into a Guest Room

This week is all about plugging along… After two weeks of illness, I’ve got to push and prod myself every step of the way to get these chores done. That said, I’m starting to feel a bit of the ol’ rhythm when it comes to my morning and evening routines. My ironing got done yesterday - all except for a blouse I forgot about that had been drying in the bathroom - and I did a little marketing this evening. My aunt is in town for a conference, and my sister and I will be making dinner for her tomorrow night. At my sister’s house, thank goodness! I may have made some progress in housekeeping since November, but my home is still far from ready to do any entertaining. At any rate, that means I’ll need to push my weekly bedroom cleaning forward to Friday evening and my new mission to Saturday morning.

It’s been a while now since I cleaned my bedroom, and I’m actually looking forward to putting it back to rights. Since I don’t have all that much in the way of news this evening, I thought I’d share this wonderful description of how the ideal guest room should be furnished from Lily Haxworth Wallace’s New American Etiquette (1941). I think we all deserve to feel as good as we’d try to make a guest feel in our homes. How do your bedrooms measure up to the ideal guest room?

Bedrooms should be liberally equipped with lights. The central bulb should operate from a switch that can easily be reached on entering the room. There should be a bed light, two, if the room has twin beds. A lamp should be above the sofa or chaise longue for reading. The bed and sofa lights should operate on individual switches.

The room should have shutters and shades so that every bit of the early morning sun can be kept out of the room if one likes to sleep late in complete darkness.

The bed or beds should be comfortable and should be well equipped with sheets, blankets (plenty of them), and a quilt. There should be two pillows, one hard and the other soft. There should be a bed light over each bed to satisfy those who like to read themselves to sleep.

Any bells for calling servants should be placed so that they can be sounded without getting out of bed.

There should always be a bedside table on top of which there should be an accurate alarm clock. The table should also hold a small tray with a glass and spoon, a thermos bottle of cold water, and a hot-water bottle or electric pad. A flashlight or candle should be beside the bed for service in the event of a breakdown in the house lighting supply.

The closet should not be the storage space for miscellaneous articles. It should have sufficient shelves and hangers for all the clothes it will hold. There should be hat stands for the women and trouser hangers for the men. Shoe trees should be amply supplied. If riding is a practice, there should be a bootjack.

There should be at least one lounging chair in the room and a sofa with comfortable cushions. They should be so placed that the light from the window is right for reading. A lamp should be near by for night reading.

A dressing table should be so placed that it receives satisfactory light from the window during the day and should have lights properly arranged for use after dark.

In the days of midsummer an electric fan is a welcome addition to the equipment of a hot room.

Mirrors should be in as many places as possible. There should be at least one of full length and the others should be placed so that they are at the proper height and receive good light.

A writing desk should be equipped with note paper, envelopes, ink, pens, pencils, stamps, blotters, and a calendar. Beside it there should be a waste basket.