#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

What's your decision making process like for thrifting pieces? I've started looking at thrifting more earnestly, and at antiques in particular to add a bit more character to my otherwise midcentury-influenced space, but I always struggle with envisioning if a piece will "go" with everything else. But you seem like you've got the mixing and matching of pieces down pat, do I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I've gotten a bunch of asks in this vein so I'm going to go a little broader than this ask to cover the general topic.

On a purely practical level, you need to know what you have. I keep what I call a house journal, which is a notebook where I've drawn out room layouts, with measurements for available space, lists of what I'm looking for, dimensions for things like doorways (do not buy anything larger than your doorways) and even fabric and paint swatches. I also keep a digital photo album of house pictures, so if I'm trying to see if something will go, I don't have to rely entirely on memory.

So, important note: my background is not in interior design--it's in set design, studio art, and graphic design, so for me, I fall back on narrative. When you're designing interior spaces for theater or film, the room is not primarily functional: it is, first and foremost, an extension of the character that inhabits it. The room exists to tell you about the person in it.

And often, that's the tack I take in my house--not using my home as a framing device for myself, but for imagined characters. For example, my living room is The Adventurer, or the Archaeologist. The character for that room is someone from decent money in the late Victorian period, the sort of person who spent their live traveling for no particular reason, and brought home all manner of oddities. The room is rich in color and texture; the furniture is mostly late 1800s, and it's both formal and lived in. Choosing things for this room, I ask if that character would own that object. I also used unifying wood tones, and a similar depth of color, to tie things in. Pick a color palette and stick to it.

My drawing room is the Alchemist. There are lots of celestial elements, but it's a workroom, so most of the furniture is very practical and simply designed. It's beaten and worn in, showing marks of use. There is lots of storage, and curious little things in jars, and plants and bones and the tools of my trade. The Alchemist uses this space to make impossible things.

The question then is not "does this match" but "would the character that embodies this space choose this? Why? What does it say about them?"

And what all of that tells you about me, is, well....I don't know, really?

#hellen highwater's house of horrors #this is just what I do

[hellenhighwater]

I feel like a lot of people are assuming that I have... an expensive house. A fancy house. My house was well under $200k (which is still a lot of money! I understand that I'm lucky to be able to buy a house at all. ) and while it has pretty good bones, it was not much to look at when I got it.

So let me show you what my house looked like when I bought it two years ago. It had no appliances except for the stove, the paint was falling off the outside, and nearly every room has needed significant work, which I'm doing mostly by myself. Almost everything in this house is secondhand, including a lot of the materials I'm using for renovations and nearly all of the appliances.

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

Every. Single. Time. that I check on the cats via security camera, Malice is asleep in the chair. Every time. These are three separate days. I'd worry she was dead if I didn't know that she's just incredibly lazy.

#accidentally put a majesty palm in front of the camera and had to move it when i was gone #hellen highwater's house of horrors #the Terrors have someone checking in but i like to look at em

[hellenhighwater]

I just remembered I have a hammock

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

I was messaging my mom earlier this week about the fact that I was starting to look for an old hutch or buffet to convert into a little built in cabinet and storage in my den (currently kitten zone). Doing an actual custom contractor-made built-in would probably run me a few thousand, but an old Marketplace furniture item and some shelving and trimwork...much cheaper.

And just now I found this for $150. Which is WILDLY cheap for something even adjacent to a map cabinet; the apothecary trend has boosted prices way high. Understandably, because they're rad. This is an old post office cabinet and each drawer is about 30 inches square.

I'm working on sorting out pickup details, which involves borrowing a truck and not being gone too long that His Highness Wazzer The Incredibly Scrawny misses a feeding. But ooooo I want this soooo bad. Think of all the paper I could store in there...

#hellen highwater's house of horrors #map cabinets routinely sell for over a thousand

[hellenhighwater]

Goodbye, space fridge!

Hello, behemoth.

#behemoth was my mom's #she's upgrading and i called dibs #i think I'm going to make him dark green. #hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

Okay, you have repeatedly requested a house tour. This is... some of it. It's kinda long. Maybe I'll do a photo post also?

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

I just picked up this cute little vanity for my guest room and I'm debating if the stool should get covered over in the blue celestial fabric. I wouldn't get rid of the needlepoint, just cover it over so that the new fabric could be removed if I wanted to later on.

I think I am going to get rid of the chest though, it's too crowded. I know some people strongly oppose diagonal beds but because this room is really only used when I have people over, most of the time I spend in here is changing the bedding and making the bed, so the diagonal makes that easy. It's a three-quarters bed, probably circa 1870-1890? I got it for $250 about a year ago on marketplace.

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

I picked up this wall sconce for $10--cheap because the glass is missing-- and converted it to a plug-in lamp and stuck it here because there was already a nail in the wall to hang it on. I think I'm going to salvage some glass from a picture frame for it, or maybe find some stained glass? I'll cut it to size either way. Not sure what color though...maybe red?

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

Is there a reason why you blocked off the secret stairs to your basement? Do you never use the basement?

The secret stairs were basement access before the addition to the house got put on, probably sometime midcentury, and they were likely used to bring coal to the furnace. They gave basement access from outside the house--the main stairs in the bathroom (why?? They literally could have put the door on the other side of the stairs and had it open, perfectly logically, into the laundry room) give basement access from inside the house.

My current furnace is natural gas, and by the time I'd bought the house, a sun porch had been built over the stairs and was in a significant state of disrepair. I fixed the sunporch and put a tile floor in, so that less cold air would get into the house.

Because the floor is tile, an access hatch to the old stairs would have been prohibitively heavy and served no purpose. Yes, technically, I could have figured out a way to make it accessible, but honestly it was going to be a lot of effort for zero benefit. So the stairs are still there, under the floor. The main stairs, which go through the bathroom, are still fully usable, if nonsensically located.

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

Every few weeks I find that the perpetual rotation of projects in my hindbrain has solved another step of the Secret DoorDrobe project, and I go out to my garage and put in an hour or so of work on that. Today I decided to tackle one of the most perilous steps: cutting the drawer into two pieces, and attaching them to the doors so that they would open with doors instead of pulling out. It doesn't look like much--this is genuinely not a difficult project, just one that has very little margin for error.

Glue and stain is drying on these pieces now, and hopefully in not-too-long, I'll be able to tackle the project of putting the back (and secret door!) on to it.

#hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

Closet's done! I nearly pancaked myself getting the shelves up solo, but I'm glad to have it done. A place for everything, etc., etc.

The doors were a pain to hang, and they're going to get painted whenever I decide what color trim is going to be in the whole entire house. They're about the same age as the house (about 120 years) but not original to the house, since previous homeowner removed all the closet doors and didn't keep them. Most of what's in here is my fabric stash, some blankets and linens for my bed, and some odd tools--the wooden box in the middle is my great-grandfather's woodcarving tools, which I used in the process of fitting these doors on.

The color is Oakmoss; it's a shade of olive that's pretty close to the olive corduroy seat on my birdcage chair, which sits in the other corner of the room.

#hellen highwater's house of horrors #there's a trick to arranging stuff so its visually appealing but still fills the available space #i can talk about that if people want #for me having my storage be pretty helps motivate me to keep it orderly

[hellenhighwater]

I'll make a proper post tomorrow when the light is better for pictures, but I finished painting the sunroom and hauled in the first round of plants that need to overwinter indoors and yeee boy it's NICE in here!

#also so much basil sage and curry here #hellen highwater's house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

I have spent the last six hours tearing down a terrible broken cabinet in my kitchen (I'm not actually sure if it was ever functional) and patching up the wall, matching the paint color to the rest of the kitchen, painting the bare spot, mounting shelves, and making myself a nice little coffee/breakfast corner.

The only issue is that I don't keep coffee at home and I don't eat breakfast. One problem at a time, I guess.

#I will probably try for better pictures in dayling #daylight #the led plant lights and incandescent amber is really making this hard to photograph #need some sunlight to level things out #hellen highwater's House of Horrors

[hellenhighwater]

I'm getting this thing, which is made of glass, and is SO stupid and I love it

And it's gotta go somewhere in here, obviously, but this room is getting kinda full

#maybe i will make a custom pot to sit in the top of it #hellen highwaters house of horrors

[hellenhighwater]

This is why I might have to paint the fireplace-- this woodstove deserves to pop! I finally got the Dragon into the house. She's not hooked up but at least I can enjoy the view.

#hellen highwaters house of horrors #I've literally been designing this room around this stove