Tired of looking at the same old walls surrounding you as you spend way too much pandemic time at home? You could update your surroundings by painting those walls. Or investing in locally produced art or photographs to break up the monotony. In a desperate last-ditch effort, you could move.
Along with obvious benefits, there are drawbacks to all these solutions. Painting is best done by a professional, but still requires a lot of effort on your part in shuffling around furniture, taking down draperies, and clearing out shelves and kitchen cabinets, not to mention the difficulty of choosing colors that you can live with until your next interior meltdown.
Art in all forms can be inspiring, entertaining, dramatic, soothing, and distracting. And buying locally helps out talented people who could use the business. But hanging art or photographs is a skill that not everybody has; it requires confidence, a good eye, a decent hammer, and the ability to find studs beneath the wall that can support whatever you're hanging.
And moving? Too much trouble unless you've found new digs with spectacular views that you'll never grow weary of seeing.
There's one more option: Start spending Sunday afternoons poking around in real estate open houses.
This may be a temporary solution, but it pays off by letting you be a voyeur into how others live while generating practical ideas on improving your personal space without the need to hire a decorator or painter or designer. What else do you have to do on Sunday afternoons? Besides, some open houses provide cookies and warm cider, but maybe not so much anymore with covid-19 going around.
As an experienced practitioner of open-house visiting, I start with the real estate section that's published in the Sunday Democrat-Gazette, which lists that day's open houses. They usually take place from 2 to 4 p.m. You can find even more listings online if you Google Open Houses Little Rock (or wherever you are).
And signage in front of for-sale houses in your neighborhood will invite you to visit places you've always wanted to snoop around in but didn't know the owners well enough to be invited inside.
Dress decently, wear a mask, and go to the most expensive houses first. The real-estate agent within knows that houses seldom sell because of open houses, so they're there to make sure the silverware stays in the drawers and to answer any questions visitors may have.
You may be surprised at some of the things you'll see, even in uppity neighborhoods with houses priced close to $1 million. As the saying goes, there's no accounting for taste.
An ultra-contemporary in a fashionable west Little Rock neighborhood made me wonder what the owners were thinking by installing a border of purple Mickey Mouse wallpaper near the ceilings in every room.
Another had so much furniture in it that I didn't notice a baby grand piano in the living room until someone else mentioned it was there. In some houses, every room is the same color (which, in one case, was black, down to the interior of the closets and the ceilings).
That's better than different colors in every room, which creates an uneasy feeling of disconnect. Speaking of uneasy feelings, a stylish home in Robinwood featured a circular inset in a bedroom ceiling hand-painted with erotic Kama Sutra figures.
Kitchens can be curious; a house in the Heights had two huge professional-quality stoves, as the couple that owned it liked to cook together. Marble countertops, though pretty, are super-porous, and will be stained by anything that's spilled on them (don't think you won't spill anything, unless you never use the likes of mustard, coffee, wine, strawberry jam, hot sauce, or any condiment with color).
And it's hard to forget the huge open shower floating in the middle of a loft bedroom in a very modern house on Edgerstoune Lane that hangs over the edge of a ravine. I checked the house out online a few days ago, and it appears that more recent owners didn't embrace the exhibitionist lifestyle; the shower has since been enclosed.
The best interiors I've observed from the many open houses I've attended have high ceilings (which make small rooms feel big), easily accessed and multi-level lighting in bathrooms and kitchens, dimmers on dining-room and living-room lights, built-in shelving, waterproof vinyl plank flooring, lots of grounded electrical outlets and light switches, and updated windows with screens that bring the outside in.
Another payoff of visiting open houses: Some of the things you'll see will make you much more likely to appreciate what your home has to offer. Be grateful for what you've got.
Karen Martin is senior editor of Perspective.