Our Home

Labours of love always take time. I mean, pregnancy takes a whole 9 months, right? And then the rest of your life to screw up your kids in your own particular way:). Our home has taken more time than it has taken for me to give birth to Bojjandi, and for him to become over a year old.

Last year was a crazy time - I was expecting for the third time, I was working on a huge project at work - in terms of scope, what we were trying to achieve for people and in terms of time and money ( we designed the world's first solar-powered mobile phone, among others), and we were getting to rent the whole house, but first it had to undergo serious repairs. The old neighbours moved out in April, and we found so many things that needed to be repaired/ reconstructed and so on. The kitchen had been infected with borer and ants and the neighbours ad refused to get anything done about it for the past three years, so first of all the kitchen had to be dismantled and the wood treated before the kitchen could be put back together. The outside area, which had been left as a sea of mud had to be paved over, as it never gets any sunlight. One bathroom had neither been used nor cleaned, it appeared, for the 7 years they had lived here, so that required ahandyman with a strong stomach to get fixed. Pipes were leaking, walls had seepage, the floor was stained...

The repairs began around April, supposedly to get over by end of August so we would have a month before the baby came to get it back together. In the immortal and universal manner of workmen world over, the work stretched and stretched until we finally threw the workmen out of the house in mid-November. The baby had already come, we were staying at my parents' house and A was on a break from work so he got to do some bits and pieces slowly and methodically - clasifying the library, for instance. For the rest, we really didn't have much time since my sister was going to visit mid-December and we had to be moved back in before that.

With much huffing and puffing, we managed to at long last get everything more or less together and moved back in Dec 10th. We still had some finishing touches to add - one room had lots of bits and pieces shoved in for later addressing, many paintings had yet to be hung up, but we figured we'd get to it in time.

Well, time has a way of rolling on and it wasn't until the time came for our annual party that we realised we had better get a move on and put our laziness/ life as parents and human beings aside and become slaves to the house. A whole lot of banging, hammering, cleaning, pushing and shoving later, we finally have the house almost as we want it. There are a few finishing tuches to come, as soon as we have any money again...though in some ways I think it'll never be 'finished' finished, since I love to keep changing things around. Want a tour? Here goes...

The entrance hall

The living room

The living room - another angle

Our pride and joy - the library

The Chinese-themed guest room

The Travel wall of the staircase

More travel pictures

Restaurant on the roof of the world - our terrace

The jungle...otherwise known as the kids' bedroom

More friends of the children

Creating Beauty

A and I often discuss what are the things that are really important in life - not the big car or the big, swanky, over done-up house, not the brand name bags or jewels - but being able to add and create beauty in your life every single day. To that end, our efforts with the garden are quite interesting. I am pretty poor at being able to visualise a garden landscape, though I can perfectly well visualise interiors of a home. But we set out to create a sand garden in one part of our lawn that gets almost no sun due to a beautiful but large jacaranda tree that blocks out the sunlight. It's still a work in progress - the bottlebrush tree has to grow, all the poppies aren't yet in bloom - but I think it's getting there. What do you think?

And this is how our entrance looks - quirky, don't you think?
And how do you like our tea guests...
... curled up in the breakfast nook?

Home, where the heart's escaping...

We finally have some parts of our home looking the way we wanted. It's been a long time in the works. We moved into this house almost 7 years ago, just A and me. We had heaps of books, lots of prints of paintings, some souvenirs from our travels and a few things we'd picked up during our courtship - a lamp, some pottery dishes, an ostrich egg, a Chinese vase...So we really had fun shopping for furniture and linen and setting it all up.

Then our water curse kicked in. We had 7 floods in a first floor flat. We traveled some more and bought more souvenirs. We visited antique shops and junk markets and scouted for finds. Then the kids came along and brought along their own contributions to home decor - tons of toys, clothes, diapers, paper that they had scribbled on and now considered art, projects they brought home from playschool. Scribbles on a wall, crayon marks on another... We outgrew the old space, lost our library to make a bedroom for the kids. Our guests had to share their room with the TV and the two kids during playtime. We were bursting at the seams and we had a baby coming!

Then this year the downstairs tenant moved out and we rented the whole space. It turned out lots of repair work was required, and we waited and waited. Meanwhile, we knew we'd have the space for a library once again, so we ordered bookshelves. I had great fun going down to Nehru Place and hunting down fabric for curtains, we hit all the sales we could find for area rugs, cushion covers, and I got to order the furniture I coveted for our new family room.

We still have bits and pieces to come together. We only decided on the theme for the guest room - Chinese - two weeks ago so new lamp shades and bed covers have yet to come. A table needs to be moved into the library. The plants need a bit of reorganising. The mural on the kids playroom wall needs to be painted and I'm being quite slow. But most of the rooms are done or offer some clue as to how they'll look eventually. Oh, and our water curse is alive and kicking!
Welcome home...
That's where I had my moment of peace yesterday...
looking at this view:
The entrance is one of my favourite spots, just because it was such a process to get it right. I wanted the wall to be painted a deep blue. I even gave the contractor a reference swatch - but clearly he didn't take it to the shop with him, because I nearly fainted the first time I saw it. He'd painted it a horrible shade of muddy turquoise blue. He repainted it twice but kept getting it wrong until finally A went with him to get the right colour. And the light fixture - I spotted it when Dad and I were shopping at Lok Nayak Bhavan for the other lights, and just fell in love with it. Luckily for me it wasn't that expensive. Expectedly, A loved it, but unexpectedly, everyone else did too, including my mom and grandma who have more traditional tastes.

My view of homes is that they should reflect the personalities of the people who live in them, be welcoming and comfortable and have little moments of surprise or delight, unexpected discoveries, if you will, even for the people who live in them. I hate homes which are all done up to impress other people, stiff, unyielding and with relentless beige. I'm so not a minimalist! Maybe one zen corner somewhere, but for the rest of the house, I need colour and light and texture and warmth.

As soon as you enter our house, thanks to a huge shelf which was built in already, you have a pretty good idea of what we're about. The shelf has a few souvenirs from travel, including my favourite, a thepanom - a kneeling figure with hands joined in a namaste, made of blue celadon, which we bought in Bangkok. The rest of the shelf has books, but naturally, since our library is always overflowing. We have books on travel, cooking, history, art, gardening, decor and entertainment here - pretty much summing up our interests! Oh, and there's usually a chair which has the overcoat, bag and shoes I wore to work that day, reflecting my other passions:)
Our house used to be mostly in our two favourite colours, red and blue. Now we have a few more colours in there. In fact, I realised that our winter decor all has touches of gold, since that's also the festive season, and that keeps the same mood throughout the house, except for the kids' playroom and bedroom which are in shades of green and cream.
That's the drawing room:


And the family room:
I had been loving this style of furniture for a while, and it was great to finally be able to order it. Somehow that and the rug we bought last year in Turkey come together to make the family room a place where we instantly feel warm and cozy. We usually end up curling up on the floor, though, instead of sitting on that sofa. As you can see, Bojjandi's enjoying a nap on the floor cushion!

We put up two of my favourite pieces of wall-art in the kids' room. I used to have a fairy tale book that I loved, as a child. A family friend had gifted it to me when I was five. It was called The World's Best Fairy Tales, compiled by Reader's Digest, and used to have the most wonderful illustrations. Sadly, this hard-bound book had fallen apart over the years. I was loath to destroy it because I wanted my kids to be able to read the stories. then I scouted around on abebooks.com and found the book, albeit in two volumes. So I ordered that and promptly took the illustrations out of the old book to have framed. We had close to 65 illustrations, so we got them framed as two large pictures, as if each illustration was in a window. I simply love these two pictures, they're so magical, and the colours so bright and beautiful.





And the kids are having great fun playing house...

Piecing it together

Helpful tip: Never have your third baby and renovate your home in the same year. It's incredibly stressful!

So...this was the year the Bojjandi chose to make his appearance, as a happy surprise for us. And, as it turned out, the tenants from the ground floor finally packed up and left and we decided to rent their place also, since we had outgrown the space we had rented 6 years ago, when there were just the two of us and no Chubbocks or Puddi in our lives, with their 3 tons of toys and other gear. Dad manages the house for the owner, who lives overseas, so he did a full evaluation of the ground floor and discovered that the previous tenants had done little or no maintenance for the past 7 years - from things as small as leaking faucets in the kitchen to a bathroom which was neither used nor ever cleaned in the entire duration!

So the contractor and his men moved in mid-July, claiming that it would just take them a month to complete all the work - from repair work to correcting water seepage to waterproofing the outside of the house to repainting all 3 floors. They started with the ground floor and managed to complete it by around mid-September. From telling us that they would let us know a week in advance of when they wanted us to move out of the first and second floors, suddenly one day they landed up brandishing their tools and asking us to vacate immediately. The move was chaotic, not least because I was working insane hours at work and heavily pregnant. poor A ended up taking the brunt of it, and our stuff got hastily moved out of their way- clothes were bundled up in old bedsheets or into the cardboard carton the new fridge came in, the kitchen stuff was spread across three rooms by our helpful household staff, all sorts of things were crammed into two rooms + the kitchen on the ground floor.

The contractor and crew didn't finish their work until way after Bojjandi was born - in fact, they just finished middle of last month, and have left delightful little surprises for us. Shower and other curtain rods are missing, doors which used to lock earlier are now unlock-able and so on. There were some things that they just couldn't do, for instance cleaning up the weird stains on the mosaic floor...Meanwhile we had our hands full dealing with three kids and were at my mom's place for the last two and a half months post Bojji. A did some of the unpacking and setting up whenever he could, including organising our massive library, and I helped at odd intervals, when I could spare the time between Bojjandi's two and a half hourly feeds.

We finally moved back Sunday and I've already been back at work half days from the 1st of Dec. So we're back to hunting out spare moments when none of the three kids want attention and we're not wiped out and needing rest ourselves to piece the rest of the house back together. It's beginning to come together room by room and it's also amazing us how many things we (especially the children) have, because we sure didn't pay for most of their stuff...On the plus side, our efficient old live-in maid who'd gone away to her village for many months, is now back with us. I'm looking forward to the day when we've finally put away every piece of the puzzle in its rightful place and can heave a sigh of relief and joy. But the thing is, in Delhi, that's never a day of final reckoning, given the constant change of seasons...