My Dream House

I have a confession to make... I am addicted, and I mean addicted, to magazines about home decor and design. "Better Homes and Gardens," "Cottage Style," "Country Living," "Country Home," all of those types of magazines. I love looking through the books, imagining all the great things I'd do to my house if I had a cagillion dollars, an army of maids, never touched or sat down on anything, and got rid of my dog... Who manages to get hair in every imaginable place in the house. Some people get fashion magazines and torture themselves on how they'll never look like the models or own their clothes... I choose to do the same with home decor magazines.

My husband says "Better Homes and Gardens" should be called "Better Homes than Yours," and he's right, because unlike my cookbook and cooking magazine obsession (yes, I have one of those too), there's no way I can ever, in a thousand years, have anything resembling what is featured in those perfect, glossy pages. At least with the cookbooks, there's an outstanding chance that I can make what they feature. Being a pretty good cook who likes to experiment with food (and has the thighs to prove it), what those books have don't seem quite so unrealistic as the beautiful home with the perfect window treatments, white couch, and immaculately maintained yards.

Well, poking around the Internet one day, I find much to my delight that there numerous websites and blogs that I can go to in order to further fuel my domestic inadequacy complex... Only these blogs are by real people in real beautiful, lived in houses. People with husbands and dogs and kids and financial limitations... Suddenly, my "Favorites" file is overflowing with tons of pretty, practical, and best of all cheap ideas I can use in my house. And every once in awhile, I float onto a blog that features a house that makes me drool.

Today, I found one such blog, abeachcottage. This poor woman has the unfortunate luck of living in a beach house only a short jaunt to the ocean, an unpleasant situation that I myself dream about almost every day. And her house... Gorgeous. I spent hours looking through her pictures, which were just mesmerising. I have to tell you, the woman had better leave her house locked when she leaves, or else she'll find that I broke in and made myself at home.

Of course, living in a non-coastal town in the US, having a beautiful beach side house is very much a dream... But I wonder, how ridiculous would it be to design my house around an ocean theme (of which I've got tons of stuff I could use for just such a theme) when the ocean itself is about 2 hours away? My sun room is already in a sort of contemporary Caribbean theme, and it seems to work well... Maybe a beachy theme in the rest of the house wouldn't look too bad?

Oh, the dreams... I really need to stop visiting Maine for vacation every year.