Friday Five: "Home Improvement" Edition

How very timely that, even as Fellow Traveler and I look forward to a weekend of finally excavating ourselves from the various collected messes of two major holidays, emergent disruptions of household routine and two dogs, the RevGalBlogPals' Friday Five is all about home improvement:

1) If you could, what room in the place you are currently living would you redo first?
Definitely the master bedroom, which badly needs a paint job as well as the removal of a ghastly border print around the walls. We want to turn this into our "Michigan room" filled with Michigan art and mementos from our travels.

2) What is the most hideous feature/color/decor item you have ever seen in a home?
For the hideous color category I'd have to nominate the home of some friends I knew in Cadillac, who bought a house with one bedroom painted entirely, top to bottom, matte black and one bedroom painted an eye-stinging fluorescent pink. The previous owners had let their teenage children paint their own rooms. 'Nuff said. My father's threadbare, duct-taped La-Z-Boy is certainly in at least the top three of hideous decor items. In the feature category, I might nominate a house I pass by frequently on my travels through Cold Comfort County, whose large front yard is almost completely filled with lawn ornaments. Elves...whirligig flowers...an assortment of animals that includes a startling pair of fiberglass Holsteins...plywood bent-over ladies...mushrooms...kissing Dutch kids...it's like a putt-putt golf course designed by someone who dropped some really bad acid in the Sixties.

3) What feature do you most covet? Do you have it? If not, is it within reach?
It would be nice to have a sun room -- a four-seasons model with heating ducts and super-insulated windows. This is probably not in the cards for us; but really, with a perfectly decent patio and comfy front "sitting room," it's kind of a superfluous fantasy anyway.

4) Your kitchen - love it or hate it? Why?
I love the spaciousness of our kitchen compared to my tiny old galley kitchen. If there's anything I'd change it would probably be the faded goldenish countertops, which have that 70's-color-palette look to them. Something more natural and neutral would, I think, look better and take more kindly to the abuse of two cooks.

5) Here is $10,000 and you HAVE to spend it on the place you are living now. What do you do?
Rip up the carpeting in the living room and front room and install more pet-forgiving colors; paint the master bedroom; do something with the windows to better insulate them; re-tile the big bathroom and replace the mirror and vanity. (The sink, which I think was intended to match a light slate blue in the tile design, is instead a kind of strange swimming-pool-aqua faux marble.) I'm pretty sure this would eat up $10,000 fairly quickly; if not, it would be kind of cool to extend the kitchen window into one of those greenhouse windows with shelfing for some houseplants to add some additional color and life to that area.

BONUS: Why do you think there was such a surplus of ugly bathroom tile colors showcased in all homes built from the 1950's right through the early 80's?
I don't know...but it's true. I've never understood the desire for "baby" colors in an adult bathroom anyway. To me a great bathroom would have cream walls with green/ ferny/leafy/stony naturalistic accoutrements.