The Devil Queen


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Location: Crow Mountain, Arkansas, United States

(Last updated on April 3, 2008)


Friday, May 22, 2009

It's A Train Wreck, It's Piling Up One By One (Part 1)

This post is in response to a question I received in a recent post's comment section. Here is the question:


So, did we always plan to sell the Devil Queen? It wasn't our primary goal, but we always figured sooner or later we'd sell it and move.

Our decision to use "personal" color choices was influenced by our last home improvement catastrophe. Our first house was bought with the idea that we'd fix it up and sell it almost immediately. As such, we tried to make it as vanilla as possible. Lots of white walls, neutral colored carpets and flooring, and bland color and style choices in general.

As our luck usually runs, bad things happened. We finished the house and put up for sale. We sold it. Almost. The buyer died the week of the closing. So, we continued living there until we bought the Devil Queen and moved into her a couple years later. We rented the house and put it up for sale again. We sold it. Almost. Our buyer married a crack whore and moved to Conway to live closer to a rehab facility shortly there after.

But, I digress. What I'm trying to get at and failing to is that we ended up living in this first house a lot longer than we planned. With my luck, I'll end up retiring in the godforsaken turd of a house. White walls are okay for nine months to a year, but after that, it starts to grate on you. Frankly, we hated the vanilla.

So, when we started working on the Devil Queen, we decided that even though we might sell her one day that we'd do her up the way we wanted to since we could be living there for a quite a long time. Besides, a new paint job is pretty easy compared to installing new plumbing, reframing walls, etc. See the rest of this blog for details. Granted, we grossly underestimated most people's willingness to work on their own home, including a seemingly simple task like painting an interior wall. We also failed to realize until much later that quite a few people seem to suffer from a fatal lack of imagination. Confronted with a purple or red wall, they are total incapable of imagining it as being anything else.

I'll be the first to admit that not all of our experiments in interior painting have gone well, the Pee Wee's Playhouse Laundry Room is case and point. However, most people who actually come and see the house in person love the color schemes. The master bathroom & bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen are favorites. Most people are overwhelmed by the orange and blue bathroom, but I still like it anyhow.

As for the yellow exterior, I'm really not sure how much of a consideration that is. Granted, it's not really finished and the first two painters we hired ass-raped it. I would argue the Joseph's Coat of a roof and the Amazonian jungle that is our yard probably deter more people than the yellow. I would also argue that while yellow might not be a traditional or period appropriate color for a Victorian, it is not entirely unheard of even in Arkansas. An image search of Google Images yielded these two houses.

I've seen more both here in Arkansas and elsewhere in the US. We also reasoned that most people who would be in the market for an old Victorian house would probably be okay with a certain amount of flamboyance.
Anyhow, I somehow still have more to say about this, but that will have to wait until after the long weekend.

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