The New Place.
When one door closes, another door opens….this one just happened to have french doors! New landlord, new place, old gossip.
We are now in an old Inn that needed a lot of work. This place was trashed from head to toe and was the equivalent of a “squatters paradise” inside. The last tenant left three years ago and left dirty dishes at the time. There were cigarette butts in the glassware, dead animals in the cupboards, grease, grime, broken lights, ugly, ugly purple walls and just extreme filth, and I haven’t even started to talk about the kitchen!
The landlord definitely has rose-colored glasses because he viewed it as a little bit of paint and vacuuming and we were good to go. That wasn’t quite all that was needed. It was only one thing that was needed. Just having stuff in the place didn’t mean it was functioning. But alas, we had the caretaker to help us get things running….does the Shining ring any bells to y’all? But, underneath all of this, was this beautiful, vintage old Inn that had a history so rich, you could almost hear the walls talk when you would put your hand against it. Despite the mess, this place had a magic all it’s own. You could almost hear Marlon Brando laughing with his buddies over cigars, or see the dresses of the ladies fly around when they danced on the dance floor. There were so many reasons to fall in love with this place, so we did.
So the work begins. The rumors start, people start stopping by with “advice”. I really have to ask this question, and please, please respond….
How often do you go into a restaurant and offer your personal advice on things like “you should have more pictures on the walls, you should paint this room a different color, you should have this soup on Thursdays because this is when I like to come in and I don’t like that soup, or even be as bold as saying, does your other cook know how I like things cooked, can you go back and show him my way. He doesn’t look like he is going to get it right?
I don’t know if I open the door too much sometimes, but these are the kind of questions I have to face every day. It’s pretty funny. So, we take the place from old and abandoned to vintage and fun. But, we still have those who want us to do everything their way, which is why the place was abandoned in the first place!
Myrna Loy's Garden Room
