Shelby's Life and Whatnot

Arts and Crafts

We are all about Arts and Crafts these days, and I'm not talking about the hobby, I'm talking about the Arts and Crafts movement. Now that we're all cozy in our little bungalow, we're turning our sights to the little historic details that make a house a home.

So yesterday we went to the Arts and Crafts conference at Disney's Grand Californian, a hotel at the Disney resort which, as you may recall, is about 2-3 miles down the street. It couldn't have been more convenient. We wandered around the exhibits drooling at the beautiful hand crafted furniture and dropping our jaws to the floor at the price of the beautiful hand crafted furniture. We were also gathering ideas about historically appropriate textiles for curtains and just some general decorating ideas. I decided that we are very lucky--Mission style furniture is simple and classic, and still produced today, so we're not stuck paying thousands of dollars for a coffee table (although this one coffee table was so cool!). We also realized the bedroom set and secretary we picked up fit right in historically so we chose well.

Continuing on the theme, today we took the Anaheim Historical Society's Arts and Crafts Home Tour. It was fascinating. We saw some absolutely gorgeous restoration work. In many cases we got to talk to the owners about their historical work--most were absolutely passionate about the preservation and restoration they'd done. It was fun to be able to say (about our house) "They took the doors off the built-in and painted it white!" and have them make that pained, emapthetic face and point to their own built-ins that had been stripped down to the original gorgeous wood. That's on my list of things to do.

We found that many, if not most houses had been moved like ours was, and most were built around 1915. Ours is about 9 years younger than that. We still haven't learned where our house was moved from, so we don't know if there are any original blueprints or tax documents verifying the year it was built, but we'd love to get ahold of those, especially the blueprint, as it's really unclear where the kitchen was.

I particularly looked at bathrooms, since we're considering an upcoming remodel of our front bathroom. Kevin and I agree that we want small hexagonal tiles for the floor and subway tiles on the wall. I also want to add a shower rail and shower attachment to our clawfoot tub. We got a lot of great ideas for bathrooms so that alone was worthwhile.