Weekend Wrap Up

Listen candy corns, it's Halloween, we're hopped up on the candy and we just ain't got that much for you today, so this one is short and sweet. Boo!

1.
Iffin Your Mama is being truthful–and we always are–we'd snitch on ourselves that we can't name from memory one single film starring Val Kilmer. We can't, 'tis true. A quick consult with the Internet Movie Data Base and we realize we've never even heard of anything Mister Kilmer has done since 2004 when he made a guest appearance on Entourage. Okay, we've heard of Knight Rider but thought it was a tee-vee show from the early 1980s with that nails-on-the-chalkboard David Hasselhoff. Besides, he wasn't really even on Knight Rider he was the voice of the car, K.I.T.T. Ugh

That said, in 2010 and 2011 alone, Mister Kilmer's got 15 (or so) projects in the hopper, in post-production, or in the planning stages, which means the moon-faced thespian and former hottie has been pretty damn bizzy lately.

The man has also been bizzy trying to unload his 5,328+ acre ranch outside of Santa Fe in Rowe, NM. He first listed the stunningly beautiful property a long time ago for $33,000,000 but recently lowered the price by $10,000,000, a somewhat shocking and desperate seeming amount. But then again, maybe the property was stoopidly priced at thirty three million.

There are, according to listing information, 6 miles of Pecos River frontage, 10 natural springs, 50 miles of hiking and riding trails and an Santa Fe adobe style main mansion filled with a lot of Native American artifacts that sprawls across 11,573 square feet and includes 7 bedrooms, 9 full and 2 half poopers.

Although we're not sure–which means don't take this to the bank–we think Mister Kilmer bunks down in Malee-boo when he's on the west coast.

2.
Noted New York City gallerist Jeffrey Deitch opened the Lower Manhattan Deitch Projects in 1996 with a show by Vanessa Beecroft and over the years presented the work of a whole lotta art making young guns like Cecily Brown, Ryan McGinness and Inka Essenhigh.

In early 2010 it was announced that Mister Deitch was to take up the reins of the top spot at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. His appointment has been, to put it mildly, controversial. Some say Mister Deitch has blazed a new and exciting path through the contemporary art world scene and breathed new life into a near moribund institution in part by erasing the lines between art and celebrity. Others will hiss that they hear the death knell of art ringing loudly in their ears when his name is mentioned in connection to the museum.

Whatever the case, Mister Deitch needed a place to live in Los Angeles and landed at the far western edge of the star studded Los Feliz neighborhood, just a quick hop from downtown where MOCA is situated. Mister Deitch recently gave Nowness a personal video tour of his nearly unfurnished but art filled house that happens to be just a few doors down from Brad Pitt's ever-expanding compound. It also happens to be where Cary Grant lived with his on-again/off-again man-friend Randolph Scott,

Property records show the house measures a sizable 6,727 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 4 poopers. Records also show the property was last purchased in 2006 for $3,200,000, which indicates that Mister Deitch leases the property. Besides Brad Pitt, Mister Deitch's nearby neighbors include tee-vee producer Keith Addis, Kevin Spacey, choreographer Adam Shankman, Christina Ricci, Mandy Moore, and screenwriter Mitch Glazer and his wife actress Kelly Lynch who live in the speck-tacular John Lautner designed Harvey Aluminum House.

Mister Deitch's house is a bee-yoot and has a "party room" that he's commissioned artist Richard Woods to outfit his "party room" like a "super Tudor-pop" environment where already got Tim Noble and Sue Webster's glitzy Golden Showers piece hanging. We're all goose-pimpled in anticipation of our invitation to the house warming once that Richard Woods room gets installed.

3.
Producer Robert Evans is a living legend around Tinseltown and like all good Hollywood legends, Mister Evans owns a legendary Jon Woolf designed Hollywood Regency style house in Beverly Hills, CA called Woodland.

Seven times married Mister Evans–who produced motion picture history like Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather, Harold and Maude, and Chinatown–hosted and entertained everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, not to mention and a whole lot of nobodies who wanted to be somebody. Henry Kissinger played tennis at Woodlawn, Robert Shapiro celebrated his 50th birthday there and Mister Evans did the bownchickabowbowm with a near endless list of Tinseltown beauties.

The New York Times recently sent a photographer into Woodland to capture some of it's beauty and myth. It's old-school, for sure, but it's magnificent and like Mister Evans, one of the last of its kind. Enjoy. We did.

Nothing to Say

 I stare at my computer screen and want to,
 long to
write something

to encourage you,
bless you,
challenge you...
maybe even show you a room makeover, or anything I have painted,
or slipcovered or organized.

But for the past few days, 

post-Relevant,

I feel the need to just sit and listen.

Ask Him what the next step is.

Ask Him what to share and how to share it.

Wait on God's voice.

Sit quietly.

Listen intently.

So I am.

~

I do have some pictures of Pennsylvania for you,
the shots of scenery are ones I took from the car.
(I live in Greenville, SC-it was a 14 hour drive home.)

We stopped in Hummelstown, PA, to go to The Olde Factory, an antiques and craft store.
The town was charming!

In the meantime, the eBay series will continue on Monday-

thank goodness for the ability to schedule posts ahead of time!

I will wait for the Lord,
take heart, and won't quit.
And wait for the Lord.
Psalm 27:14

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones Go Country (Plus some floor plan porn for good measure.)

BUYERS: Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones
LOCATION: Bedford, NY
PRICE: $5,075,000
SIZE: 6,300 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: This sunny Friday morning Your Mama's going to piggy-back on a recent report in The Post about the purchase of a country house in the rolling hills of pretty and preppy Bedford, NY by two time Academy Award winning actor Michael Douglas and his one time Academy Award winning wife Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Bedford and the surrounding communities of Westchester County claim a wide array of high profile property owners such as domestic arts tycoon and ex-con Martha Stewart, the soo-blime actress Glenn Close, Matthew Bronfman (heir to the Seagrams booze fortune), aging but still hot to trot actor Richard Gere and his ladee Carrie Lowell, multi-billionaire financier George Soros–breath, breath, breath–Abigail Disney (of the Disney family), comedian and actor Chevy Chase, and fashion fat cat Ralph Lauren whose clothes sort of exemplify the high-nosed horsey vibe of the über upscale semi-rural Westchester County bedroom communities located just north of and easy commuting distance from New York City.

Clarification: Before any of you people start getting sassy and smart mouthed with Your Mama, be aware that we are well aware that there are plenty of areas within Westchester County that are actually pretty trashy or, at least, not nearly as genteel or stiff lipped as some of the more quietly ritzy areas. Okay?

The astonishingly beautiful Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas has been doing the Entertainment Bizness Shuffle since she was just a wee lassie in Wales. In the early 1990s she shot to stardom when she appeared on the British tee-vee dramedy The Darling Buds of May. She got her big break in the U.S. cinema industry in 1998 with The Mask of Zorro. It wasn't until she hooked up with her Hollywood hotshot huzband that her career as a siren of the silver screen really took off like Secretariat out of the gate. Since gettin' with Mister Douglas–in what may or may very well not be a coincidence of timing–Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas has landed plum roles in blockbuster movies such as Traffic, Chicago, Ocean's Twelve, and the upcoming biopic of painter Salvador Dalí in which she's rumored to play Gala Dalí opposite Antonio Banderas as the mustachioed master of surrealism.

The impressive and long resume of the quickly-becoming-an-iconic-actor Mister Douglas includes starring roles in major motion pictures that include the bone chilling Coma, The China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, The War of the Roses, Basic Instinct in which our favorite koo-koo bird Sharon Stone flashes her down there bits for the world to ponder, Traffic, Solitary Man, and the successful but unfortunate sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. We can't help it, we just hate sequels. Why not just leave well enough alone. Anyhoo, in addition to being an honest to goodness movie star, Mister Douglas has done quite well for himself on the boob-toob earning four Emmy nominations, three for the 1970s cop drama The Streets of San Francisco and one in 1998 for playing a leering and creepy but endearing closeted detective who took a sexual shine to Will on Will & Grace.

The first marriage for Mister Douglas–the eldest son of legendary 3-time Oscar nominated dimple chinned actor Kirk Douglas–was with a ladee named Diandra who, as it turns out, has her magnificent and fabled mansion in Montecito, CA–called La Quinta–on the market for a breath taking but not unheard of for Montecito $29,000,000.

Mister Douglas and the first Missus Douglas finalized their dee-vorce, which reportedly cost Mister Douglas around $45,000,000, in June of 2000. In August of the same year, a preggers Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas–who was still, technically, Miss Zeta-Jones at the time–popped out the first of the pair's two children. A couple months later, in mid-November, Mister Douglas made an honest women of Miss Zeta-Jones and hitched his celebrity wagon to her rising star.

There seems to be some dispute and guffawing over just how old Missus Zeta-Jones Douglas actually is; She is officially, professionally and more than likely 41. What is not in dispute is that her father is younger than her huzband. Now listen, butter beans, Your Mama has nary an issue with a May-December fling, romance or marriage but when your father is younger than your huzband you've done pushed on through to something a little more like an icky and ill-fitting February-December sort of thing. You know we're saying, puppies?

Anyhoo, getting back to the real estate matter at hand, as the story goes in The Post, Mister Douglas and Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas leased the house they bought in Bedford for "at least six months" before signing on the deed's dotted line. Listing information Your Mama scared up out of the interweb shows the serene estate, purchased for $5,075,000, stretches across 5.7 acres dotted with mature stands of trees. Surrounded on three sides by a famous horse farm, a long gravel driveway streaks across the plush property to a privately situated 1930s white brick center hall Colonial style mansion with six-over-six sash windows and classic black shutters.

The 6,300 square foot two-story manse, according to listing information, includes 5 bedrooms and 5.5 poopers as well as a separate guest house or caretaker cottage. Inside, past the petite portico entrance, a wonderfully long living room features hardwood floors, a library nook and the first of five fireplaces. The formal dining room, wrapped in wallpaper that like a Gordian Knot depicts a countryside and house that looks suspiciously like the actual house in which the wallpaper is hung, has a discreet corner fireplace.

Much of the seller's day-core reeks of dignified but boring Grandmas and Grandpas but, just as a pimento gets stuck up into an olive, the vintage house contains a country style but contemporary and fully equipped kitchen recently redone to include white Shaker style cabinets, marble counter tops, multiple work zones, two dishwashers, a breakfast bar and built-in desk area where, iffin we lived here, Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter's stink-eyed housekeeper Svetlana would sit and yakkety-yak on the phone in a foreign language for hours at a time.

The ground floor also includes a library and breakfast room both with fireplace, a sun room with a row of French Doors with arched fan lights, a powder pooper and a bedroom with private terliting facilities that Your Mama suspects might be a pinched room where the housekeeper or live-in terlit gurl is supposed to live. Upstairs, in addition to the master suite with its Delph blue and white toile covered everything, there are two more en-suite bedrooms and a fourth, the only bedroom with a fireplace, that shares a pooper with an office and the laundry facilities.

A tree-shaded brick terrace off the back of the house steps down to vast swathes of lawn kept green by a sprinkler system. At one back corner of the property, surrounded by trees, a small pond or maybe the swimming pool and at the other back corner what looks to Your Mama might have been a grass tennis court.

Since word of the purchase slipped down the celebrity real estate grapevine, Your Mama has heard two interesting bits of entertainment to supplement our real estate story. The first is that we heard from a well-connected fella' named Imogene Imnotaboy that super star professional baseball stud Derek Jeter bought–or is in the process of buying–a house on the very same street as Mister Douglas and Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas. We're not really sure why Mister Jeter, who reportedly owns homes in Marlboro, NJ and Greenwood Lake, NY, would want or need a house in Bedford too. But children, who are we to question or make sense of the wacky real estate ways of the rich and famous? Mister Jeter currently has his apartment in Manhattan on the market at $20,000,000 and he's currently building a colossal–some might say colossally overbuilt–crib on Davis Island in Tampa, FL.

The other tidbit we heard but can not confirm–which means its just rumor and gossip–was that Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas was recently seen leaving the local discount retail emporium Target with a red basket full of bargains for her and her family's new house in the country. See puppies, even ridiculously famous multi-millionaires like a bargain just as much as someone struggling to put food on the table.

The Douglas/Zeta-Jones Douglas clan reportedly have more than half a dozen homes including a luxury apartment in New York City, where it is Your Mama's understanding they have a significant spread at the Kenilworth, an ornate, 1908 architectural wedding cake of an apartment block on Central Park West built in the French Second Empire style. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones are not the only entertainment bigwigs to live up in the Kenilworth. Two-time Emmy winner Dick Cavett owns an apartment in the building as does two-time Oscar nominated and 5-time Emmy winning actor John Lithgow.

Our research shows that in addition to the apartment in the Big Apple and now the country estate in Bedford, NY, Mister Douglas and Miz Zeta-Jones Douglas own (or owned) a home base in the Bahamas, a ski house in Aspen, a cliff-top compound in Majorca, an apartment in Los Angeles' Century City, a large house in her native Swansea (Wales) and a 5 bedroom beachfront hideout on a private island in the Turks & Caicos islands.

Based on Your Mama's rudimentary and wholly unscientific research, we've determined that apartments at the 42-unit Kenilworth building rarely come up for sale. According to Streeteasy, there have been only 4 recorded sales in the building over the last five years plus a fifth transaction that appears to be an intra-family transfer of some kind.
Currently, only one apartment at the Kenilworth appears on the open market: a 3,200 square foot, medium-high floor beauty with 2 actual bedrooms, 3.5 poopers and another a cell-sized staff room tucked up into the back of the apartment behind the kitchen. The unit currently carries a screaming $17,500,000 price tag with painful maintenance charges of $5,500 per month.

Before any of y'all get to conclusion that we're suggesting this might be Mister Douglas's digs, we're not. In all honesty, we don't know who owns this apartment that grandly claims 50 feet of de-voon and deeply desirable direct frontage over Central Park. A small foyer with a couple of coat closets opens into a gallery with intricate dentil molding where a couple of muscular square columns separate the gallery from the formal dining room with its direct park views. Also opening directly off the gallery, a library also has enviable park views. However, the cherry on this real estate sundae is the corner living room with panoramic over-the-tree-top views east over Central Park towards the dee-luxe apartment towers that line Fifth Avenue and south toward Midtown and Rockefeller Center.

The service area was nicely squirreled away at the rear of the apartment and connected to both the public and private quarters by a couple of cleverly placed corridors. The eat-in kitchen has honey colored cabinets with glass-fronted uppers, granite counter tops, a 6-burner Viking range and two Sub-Zero refrigerators. A couple of Parisian café chairs and a two-sided banquette upholstered in a fuzzy beige fabric surround the table for six in the breakfast area of the cookery. To one side of the kitchen, a decent sized private laundry room with service elevator access and, on the other, a slim room better used as a home office than a staff bedroom.

It appears to Your Mama that two smaller bedrooms may have been combined to create a 27 foot long master bedroom with entry vestibule, walk in closet, private pooper, and book-shelf lined sitting room with peripheral southern views of Central Park. Iffin that is indeed what's happened, the original master bedroom became a generous if not huge second bedroom with private facilities, double exposure with western and southern views plus a lateral park view.

photos: (Bedford): Vincent & Whittemore, Inc.
photos (New York City): Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate

Bill and Giuliana Rancic Buy Big House in Hinsdale, and etc.

MonetizeBUYERS: Bill Rancic and Giuliana (DePandi) Rancic
LOCATION: Hinsdale, IL
PRICE: $1,560,000
SIZE: 12,000 (ish) square feet, 7 bedrooms, 9.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The past few years have been a bit of a real estate whirlwind for celebrity news gossip Giuliana (Depandi) Rancic and her entrepreneurial man-mate Bill Rancic. Since getting married in 2007 the budding young couple have bought and sold a number of properties in both Los Angeles, CA and Chicago, IL including a recently acquired a mansion in a the upscale Chicago suburb of Hinsdale.

Mister Rancic, who once auditioned for that sicko show The Bachelor on which a dozen or so tarted up woman grovel embarrassingly for the affections of a single man, rocketed to fame in 2004 as the winner of the first season of Donald Trump's The Apprentice program. Prior to becoming one of Mister Trump's minions he made boo-coo bucks with an online endeavor called Cigars Around the World. Nowadays Mister Rancic earns an impressive living as a motivational speaker, reality television denizen, real estate developer and the host of a program we've never heard of on the A&E channel called We Mean Business.

Like her huzband, Missus Rancic also takes a multi-pronged approach to her career. Not only does she work her skinny stuff as the hostess with the mostess on E! News with Mister Vanilla Bean himself, Ryan Seacrest, she regularly fawns over the sartorial and tonsorial choices of famous folks at various red carpet events, sometimes co-hosting with that deeply troubling lavender haired Jay Manuel character from America's Next Top Model who regrettably wears more damn make-up than the late, great Tammy Faye Baker. Missus Rancic also appears on a program called the Fashion Police, an after the red carpet show show on which fashion, ahem, icons like Joan Rivers and Khloe Kardashian critique red carpet walkers. Thankfully, the people at Fashion Police have finally and recently installed some actual fashionistas like Kelly Osbourne and kinky haired celebrity stylist George Kotsiopoulos on the panel because, come on, Khloe Kardashian? Pleeze. Hasn't the world had enough of these Kardashians yet? Lord knows Your Mama has.

Anyhoo, in the mid 2000s he wrote–with the help of actual writers–a number of self-help style books about how to succeed in bizness and life and in 2007 she wrote a dating advice book for lonely women called Think Like a Guy: How to Get a Guy by Thinking Like One. Together, after they got hitched, they penned I Do, Now What?, a relationship advice book.

The apparently quite happy couple, who never, ever, EVER seem turn down an opportunity to have a tee-vee camera pointed at them, were married in 2007 in a fairy tale type ceremony in Italy that was watched on The Style Network by upwards of five million people. She settled in Los Angeles where she works most of the time and he in Chicago where his budding bizness empire is based.

In 2009 the couple swung open the doors of their private life for the world to watch on the reality program Giuliana & Bill. Since Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter prefer our reality television programs be of the tawdry and trashy variety, we've never actually laid eyes or ears on the couple's eponymous reality show. From our brief bit of research on the interweb we understand that much of the program revolves around the bumps and bounces of the very busy newlyweds who maintain an inter-state marriage.

The paper thin Missus Rancic has been wanting to get a baby up in her the last few years, a sad saga that has, we understand, played itself out on the couple's reality program. Her doctors suggested she try to put some meat on her bones in order to increase her chances of getting preggers. She gained a few pounds that no one but her could see and went through the expensive in vitro fertilization process since the normal way, while fun, just didn't produce the desired result. She did get to be with child, but in September of 2010 Missus Rancic had a miscarriage, an horrific and intensely personal event filmed for their reality program.

A few weeks ago on an episode of their reality program, the couple was seen hunting for a house in upscale Hinsdale, IL, due west of downtown Chicago. Ever since then Your Mama has received an unusual number of queries from the children who want to know which house shown on the show Mister and Missus Rancic purchased. A few minutes digging around the interweb one day didn't produce any real estate gold so we set the matter aside and promptly forgot about it until we until we received a covert communique last week from Suhneeta Snitcharoo who relayed all the 411 about Mister and Missus Rancic's new nest, which property records reveal they actually purchased in May of 2010.

Property records and listing information show that Mister and Missus Rancic paid $1,560,000 for a not yet completed mansion that's a short hop from downtown Hinsdale, measures a monstrous 12,000(ish) square feet and includes a total of 7 bedrooms and 9.5 poopers. That's a lot of house and too many damn terlits for a child-free couple but iffin Your Mama had to guess we'd guess they'll soon jump back on the in vitro horse and ride again. Or maybe they'll adopt, who knows? By whatever method, the Rancics clearly plan to make or acquire babies. Now they have plenty of room to raise all the babies they've not yet had.

Listing information for the property that Your Mama teased out of the internets shows that all the cabinets, floors, plumbing, heating, windows, and doors–much of which had yet to be installed at the time of the purchase–were included in the purchase price of the hulking house that stands three stories tall. Listing information indicates the house has scads of stone and brick detailing, numerous stone columns, a double staircase to the upper level (plus an elevator for when they feel lazy), a wine cellar and media room. Your Mama presumes the completion and customization of Mister and Missus Rancic's somewhat recently purchased residence will feature prominently on future episodes of the couple's reality tee-vee program.

Now then, let's move on to the peripatetic pair's other recent real estate doings, shall we?

In July of 2007 Mister Rancic shelled out $1,500,000 for a single family townhouse on Chicago's Gold Coast. The 1908 residence was given a Rancic Re-do and flipped back on the market and sold in March of 2009 for $3,595,000. Listing information shows the 5,460 square foot townhouse has 3 bedrooms 3.5 poopers, a complete movie theater, exterior security cameras, radiant heated floors, a heated 1.5 car garage, and 10 flat screen televisions. Ten! We think 10 tee-vees is probably to be expected from a tee-vee couple but Your Mama would go out of our damn mind knowing there were 10 tee-vees in the house. We love the damn squawk box as much as the next person but we just can't understand the need of some people to have at least one in every room. It's unclear–or, rather, Your Mama has no idea–if Mister and Missus Rancic ever actually occupied the townhouse property.

In May of 2009, Missus Rancic took in $725,000 when she sold her Thom Filicia decorated bachelorette pad on the 20th floor of a Wilshire Boulevard high-rise in Los Angeles. Property records show Missus Rancic picked the place up in January of 2003–when she was still Miss DePandi–for $465,000. Missus Rancic first listed the 1 bedroom and 2 pooper pad in March of 2008 for $899,000 but by March of 2009 when Your Mama diss and discussed the condo it was listed at $749,000. Since Missus Rancic slings gossip and critiques clothes primarily in Tinseltown, we assume that she and the mister have purchased another Lala Land pied a terre but, honestly bunnies, Your Mama don't know nuthin' about that.

In June of 2009, Mister and Missus Rancic parted with $1,185,000 when they bought a foreclosed condo on high floor of a high-rise on Michigan Avenue's Miracle Mile. The 2 bedroom and 2.5 pooper aerie was given the Rancic Re-do and has been on the market since April of 2010 when it first appeared with an asking price of $1,650,000. The price has since dipped and dropped to it's current price tag of $1,499,000.
The 50th floor spread, seen frequently on the couple's reality program, has lovely matte finish ebony hardwood floors, acres of gleaming white walls, phenomenal views, an open plan main living area, and a sleek kitchen with dark flat fronted cabinets, marble counter tops and, strangely, a bright school bus yellow stove that glares out at you, smiles and hisses "What are you looking at, asshole?"

The poopers, wrapped in travertine and frosted glass, were all worked over in the renovation and the walk in closet in the master bedroom is a custom crafted corridor lined with cabinets and drawers that hide every belt, slipper and slip dress. Iffin Your Mama were the betting type we'd ante up our britches that the outside wings of the tri-panel mirror at the end of the closet corridor fold in like in a fain-cee department store dressing room and enable Missus Rancic to see all sides of herself when she's trying to decide what to wear. That's not an easy thing to do for Missus Rancic, choosing and outfit, because let's be honest, celery sticks, if beehawtcha's gonna be on the boob-toob smartin' off about the unfortunate fashion choices of other people in the public eye then she better be turning in out every damn time. There's no such thing as going to the 7-11 in a ratty-tatty pair of sweatpants and a tube top for Missus Rancic, you know?

As for the day-core? Meh. There's nothing really wrong with it; It's all very non-threatening, contemporary and camera friendly. There's little Your Mama sees besides the cockamamie and ill-chosen artworks that will challenge or should offend any delicate decorative palettes. It looks to Your Mama like every stick of furniture here came from the same showroom or shop. That's a convenient way to go if your bizzy–and these two are bizzy little beavers–but it also leaves the place with precious little real personality, like a tee-vee set or an expensive but generic suite in a huge chain hotel that's trying to masquerade as a chic boo-teek hotel. You know what we're saying?

Your Mama imagines that if Mister and Missus Rancic have not yet completed their Rancic Re-do and moved into their new mansion in Hinsdale, they'll soon be doing so, setting out pumpkins, hanging a sheet ghost in the tree, laying some dried wheat across the mantle or whatever it is wealthy suburban people do to decorate their mansions for Halloween. Even though Your Mama can't fathom why anyone might want to bring a child into this world–we are at our core a socio-political cynic–we genuinely hope that Mister and Missus Rancic soon get what they want, a slew of baby Rancics running around and filling up some of the seven lonely bedrooms of their humongous house.

listing photos (Hinsdale): Coldwell Banker
listing photos (Chicago): Baird & Warner

Putting First Things First :: My Heart, Your Home

My dear, sweet home making girlfriends,

I am still processing the remarkable teaching and fellowship that I experienced 

at The Relevant Conference

this past weekend.

I want to share it all with you.

First, for those of you who blog:

I want you to know how important it is for you to blog for Christ's glory, 
if this is why you blog.

I want for you to know what a rare and valuable gift we have, the use of this internet, 

 to share with the globe our hearts and homes.

Second, for those of you who do and don't blog, 

I want you to know that your role is most precious in the sight of God.

~


I love, love, love this quote 

by J.R. Miller

in his book, "Secrets of a Happy Home Life", 1894

"The woman who makes a sweet, beautiful home, filling it with love and prayer and purity, 

is doing something better than anything else her hands could find to do beneath the skies. 

A true mother (woman) is one of the holiest secrets of home happiness. 

God sends many beautiful things to this world, many noble gifts; 

but no blessing is richer than that which He bestows in a mother (woman) 

who has learned love's lessons well, 

and has realized something of the meaning of her sacred calling."

However, 

nothing we do in our house home (our physical dwelling place) will have meaning

 until out heart home is lived-in by Jesus.

He is the One who transforms the messes into methods, clutter into calmness. 

He transforms the places in our hearts to reflect His likeness: 

love, redemption, grace, peace & holiness, 

and He wants to live in and be welcome there. 

Ephesians 2:22 says so: "And because you belong to him, you too are being built together. 

You are being made into a house where God lives through his Spirit."

Interior decorating is really His specialty!

So, as Jesus transforms us on the inside, 
may our house be transformed into a home as well!

Morning Floor Plan Porn: Before and After

Listen butter beans, Your Mama is short on time this morning because we have to get out of the house early to go film for The Gossip Queens program on the gay gay gay Logo channel. But before we git on our hobby horse and ride, we thought we'd leave y'all with a little New York City floor plan porn to ponder.

A man named Steven Ells, the co-founder and CEO of the ballooning Chipotle "Mexican" food franchise, has been making real estate headlines in New York City for the last year or so with his increasingly fat real estate portfolio of properties located in various areas of the West Village neighborhood of New York.

The burrito bigwig not only owns and a full floor loft style spread on Waverly Place–bought in March 2008 for $5,650,000 and currently on the market with an asking price of $6,250,000–he also possesses a speck-tack-u-ler Steven Harris designed townhouse on Jane Street that he snatched up in early 2008 for $13,400,000.

We don't know if townhouse livin' didn't suit Mister Ells or if he's just got an serious case of the Real Estate Fickle, but in December of 2009 it was reported that the King of the Barbacoa Burrito forked over $11,000,000 for a third high-priced West Village spread, this one a 10-room penthouse with wrap around terraces atop one of the best buildings on lower Fifth Avenue.

Because the acquisition was well covered by the lovely Miss Malle at the Observer and fine folks at Curbed and New York magazine, Your Mama opted to not discuss the posh, pre-war penthouse pad.

However and although we are not nor ever will be in the market for an eleven million dollar penthouse–or an eleven million dollar anything else–Your Mama did take a serious shine to the penthouse aerie. So, we spent a few hours re-working the floor plan (below) to better suit the lifestyle of Your Mama, the Dr. Cooter, our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly and our mean ol' pussy Sugar.
Even though it would make most domestic live-ins swoon with envy, the first order of bizness was to blow out the staff quarters in order to create a more open kitchen layout with a pair of fancy steel framed French doors that open directly out to the long terrace that runs the entire length of the north side of the penthouse. We figure that iffin we can cough up eleven million dollars for a penthouse in Greenwich Village we can afford to buy our madcap and totalitarian house gurl Svetlana her own studio or 1 bedroom apartment in the building.

We left the living room untouched since it's pretty much perfection with its trio of French doors that open to the south facing terrace, but since we're not big on hosting banquet style dinner parties we chose to shorten the formal dining room in order to make room for a new corridor that connects the entrance hall to the new powder pooper and the luscious guest suite fashioned from what the original floor plan called a study. Notice how we've lined up the corridor on axis with the swinging door that connects the kitchen to the entrance hall?

Since we do not or ever plan to have actual children, we chose to convert the second bedroom to a privately situated office/library wrapped in bookshelves and closet storage. Next came the master bedroom. Since we don't really care for a large sleeping chamber we partitioned part of the original bedroom off in order to create a dressing room that leads to the private poopers. We're sure that some will whine and complain about the puny size of the master pooper but we don't care for a large private bathroom since we really don't spend much time in them.

To complete the transformation we removed the hideous greenhouse that covered the terrace off the master bedroom. Your Mama just hates those horrid things. They just remind us off all those naughty boys in elementary school who thought it was cute and fun to use a magnifying glass to scorch the life out of bugs. Anyhoo, in our plan we installed a gate between the terrace off the living room and the terrace off the master bedroom in order to carve out a private outdoor enclave for nood sunbathing.

American Idol Kelly Clarkson Lists at a Loss

SELLER: Kelly Clarkson
LOCATION: Nashville, TN
PRICE: $1,449,000
SIZE: 4,900 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Yesterday afternoon Your Mama received a covert communique from one of our Music City snitches–this one we call The Nashville House Whore–who gleefully whispered in our big ear that pop-rock singer/songwriter Kelly Clarkson recently listed her residence in Nashville, TN with an asking price of $1,449,000.

Miss Clarkson was, of course, the first contestant to win American Idol. This was way back in 2002, long before that program became the tired and wrung out tee-vee tragedy that it is today. Unlike some of the other winners of the televised singing contest–can you say Ruben Studdard and Taylor Hicks?–the pint-sized belter has gone on to great commercial success with a couple of platinum albums, world wide tours, and two Grammy Awards.

Now children, Your Mama knows about as much about Miss Clarkson and her particular brand of music as we do about quantum physics, which is to say just about nothing. What we do know right off the top of our puny head is that she's got a big, powerful and earthy voice and that she's often rumored to be a lesbian, which she says she is not. A quick spin through the interweb tells us that Miss Clarkson is fixin' to release a new album sometime in 2011 that we are certain we'll never lay ears on unless we happen to wander into a Gap store or some other mass retailer that pipes pop music into its stores.

According to property records and previous reports, Miss Clarkson picked up her Nashville nest in August of 2007 for $1,490,000. A few quick flicks of the well worn beads of Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that even if Miss Clarkson's real estate people manage to snag a buyer willing to pay full $1,449,000 asking price Miss Clarkson still faces a forty thousand dollar bang to her bank account not counting renovation costs and the fat real estate fees she'll have to fork over when the house sells.

Listing information shows Miss Clarkson's pretty but ordinary looking stone faced house, located in the upscale Belle Meade area of Nashville, measures around 4,900 square feet and includes 5 bedrooms and 6 poopers. It should be noted that the Davidson County tax man's records indicate Miss Clarkson's crib has just 3 bedrooms and 3.5 poopers in 5,470 square feet. We're not sure why the discrepancy but iffin we were the betting type we'd put all our money on the figures shown on the real estate listing.

Your Mama doesn't know all of the changes Miss Clarkson made to her Nashville nest after she signed on the deed's dotted line, but we can see from cross-comparing current listing photos with listing photos from the time she purchased the property that she fiddled with the landscaping, replaced all drapery with simple white Plantation style shutters throughout most of the house, darkened the hardwood floors from a honey tone to a dark caramel color, and painted every room a different damn color. We've got wine colored walls in the formal living room, celadon in the dining room, mustard up on the walls in the kitchen, buttercup in a tee-vee watching room, saturated brick in a large room of unknown purpose on the second floor, chilly ice blue in the master bedroom, and what looks like the palest of celery in the master pooper. Listen puppies, we know that paint is an easy thing to change but right now this place looks like the damn show room of a paint store.

Anyhoo, to the right of the small entrance hall, the formal living room has brown hardwood floors and a fireplace. Beyond the living room, through a skinny doorway is the formal dining room where that ca-rayzee Staging Lady in a Pink Toyota made the inexplicable and mournful mistake of furnishing the room with nothing but a set of patio furniture and a forlorn bundle of twine tied sticks tied leaning on the wall. Bitch, pleeze. Somebody get Your Mama a nerve pill because we're about to pass out from this mystifying and inexcusable decorative deliquency. Additional rooms within Miss Clarkson's 1.5 story quasi Connecticut Cape Cod style house, according to listing information, include a den, study, office, and recreation room.

One of the more significant changes Miss Clarkson made to her country music capital crib was to upgrade of the kitchen with all new higher end stainless steel appliances, replace the back splash with tile that looks like brick or stacked slate or something like that, and stain the once honey colored cabinetry a deep shade of green with milk chocolate undertones. Listen, puppies, it's better than the bone chilling banality of its previous incarnation, however Your Mama just can't quite get comfortable with green cabinetry in the kitchen. Or maybe it's that we can't decoratively reconcile the green cabinetry with the mustard colored walls. Whatever the case, it's in dire need of a nice, gay decorator to get in there are work out the kinks.

Two of the five bedrooms–including the master suite–are situated on the main living level which is convenient for fat asses who can't be bothered to climb a single flight of stairs to to to bed. Presumably the 3 remaining bedrooms are tucked up into home's second story with its trio of peaked dormers that run along the front of the house. The bedroom sized master pooper, according to listing information, was upgraded and now has a poured concrete floor, double sinks of the dog bowl variety, and a free-standing soaking tub shaped like a damn gravy boat.

The back of the house opens to a slate terrace enclosed on three sides by the house, the 3-car garage wing and a free standing screened porch with stone floor, vaulted exposed wood ceiling and an impressive stone fireplace. A wide and long tree shaded lawn stretches out beyond the terrace and screened porch with plenty of room for a swimming pool although swimming pools don't seem to be as de rigueur in Nashville as they are in some other parts of the country where famous folks congregate such as Los Angeles and the Hamptons.

Your Mama does not know if Miss Clarkson plans on purchasing another crash pad in the Nashville area or if she's already bought another pied a terre in Nashville. However, as far as we know–which ain't much–her primary residence remains a gated, multi-parcel spread south of Fort Worth, TX in semi-rural Mansfield with a 4,794 square foot house, swimming pool and private pond that records show the original American Idol purchased in November of 2004.