The Calm Before the Storm

December at the Molette House was quiet relative to renovations since our focus was on relaxing, being with family and enjoying the holidays!

Our accomplishments around the house included getting grass sod installed, finalizing window treatment ideas and fabrics, and getting a couple of pieces of furniture in place that we desperately needed.

As you know, the house sits in a cotton field and the yard is basically just part of the field that has been leveled. We’ve never planted anything, but naturally weeds have grown up and taken over. Our landscape maintenance team of Norm and Diane Oglesby have done a wonderful job of keeping the weeds trimmed and making the house look at least presentable, especially for being the 200-year-old Lady that she is!

However, after one too many thunderstorms and one too many bouts of mud being tracked into the house, we decided we needed some grass, so we brought in Greg Bjelke. After much debate, we finally settled on Zoysia and, we really like the new version known as Zeon. It is touted to be heat, drought, weed, disease, and insect resistant, so that is just what we are looking for.

However, it is expensive so we couldn’t do the whole yard and settled on a band of grass around the house. Greg and his crew did a phenomenal job with installation and it is looking good (although it does remind us sometimes of a giant air conditioning unit sitting on a grass pad).

Our hope is that the grass will get established and eventually spread to cover the whole area, although that will take a few years. Of course, when it comes to this house, a few years’ time registers only slightly on the overall time scale.

We also spent time picking our mirror frames, getting mirrors fitted, and placing them in the guest bathroom and the downstairs bathroom. Those rooms have gone several years without mirrors, which is not always a bad thing. 😊

We also had the pleasure of going to the Look antiques store in Selma that Ann Murray opens to the public the first Saturday of each month, and we had a delightful experience. She has a great eye for design and is very creative in her acquisitions and arrangements.

We found an antique tall desk that we think will look good in the downstairs bathroom because it is a large room with tall ceilings and the desk provides both interest and storage. Every time we go to Look we find something new and interesting.

Eleanor spent much time in fabric stores looking for just the right fabric for bed linens and window treatments. She even set up a file system of all the possible fabrics and carried that with her everywhere to use as a reference in getting samples to try out back at the house.

For every fabric we ended up selecting there were probably four-five others that we liked but didn’t work for one reason or another.

We have found a wonderful seamstress who is making all curtains, pillow, and bed coverings for us, and we are thrilled to have her.

One fabric item that actually was completed was the cushion for the window seat in the nook. It was much larger than we remembered, and it actually would only fit in the back of our SUV if we bent it into a U-shape!

We did take the time to kick back and relax, to visit some neighbors, and to plan our big push on the house for January and February to be ready for the open house as part of the Selma Pilgrimage March 15-16 1:00-5:00 PM for our house both days (Friday and Saturday).

If you are in the area and can make it, we would love to see you then