If I had an open house

After all the time spent remodeling, fixing up and repairing around our venerable, suburban, family home in the suburbs, I thought we needed an open house. When I mentioned it to my husband he asked, “What would we have to do?”
“Ohh, a super-clean-up and gracefully decorate of every room and every surface inside the house.” The pained look on his face was enough for me to substitute this descriptive tour of the Hershberger habitat:
The gracefully, aged living room furniture is from an Indiana furniture gallery housed in an old ladder factory. Throughout the house can be seen various pieces — such as the computer desk – from my collection of Hershberger custom made furniture. On the walls is an original collection of family portraits and framed prints from yard sales as well as tastefully matted and persevered 2001 calendar pictures.
My mom-in-law re-finished the stacking bookshelves years ago. Her descendants added the aged look by cracking the glass. My grandmother’s bookshelf with the long glass door holds heirloom plates which have been in the family so long that no one dares say they are ugly.
The dining room table comes from a furniture factory in the wilds of Indiana farm country with enough leaves to seat 34 toddlers or 21 adults. It is set with slightly chipped china selected from a late 60’s Sears and Roebuck catalog.
We found the dining room chairs at a school auction for 25 cents a piece – with all the arm desks broken off. The sawed-off arm desks have served our energetic family well since the mid-70’s.
The re-finished upright piano is a graceful repository for family portraits, coats, books, papers and car keys. It comes from the same school auction with a complete set of unbroken, ivory keys. A toddler, with a wooden hammer soon remedied that. The piano bench doubles as a dining room table booster seat for visiting toddlers – who do not own wooden hammers.
In the sitting room is a lovely rotating library shelf from a St. Louis church rummage sale. I like to fill it with my collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. My grandson likes to empty it of my Reader’s Digest Condensed Books collection and spin it around and around. Beside the antique futon is a display case with the china party tea set used at my daughter’s childhood birthday parties carefully arranged on a tablecloth created from a Strawberry Shortcake baby quilt.
You will notice that each room, including the bathrooms, holds bits and pieces of our extensive literary collection. I prowl garage sales to accumulate the dog-eared novels, biographies, self-help books and children’s books. My son’s finds at book sales have more than doubled our collection.
We conclude our tour in the doorway of my son’s room. My grandmother’s old dresser – minus its original mirror – is surrounded by my son’s carefully torn out collection of National Geographic pictures and maps, all masterfully arrayed on the walls with tape.
His clothes, books and papers on every surface surely are an artistic arrangement. To think otherwise would mean he hadn’t had time to clean his room before I opened my home for this descriptive tour of the Hershberger homestead.


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