The Accidental Collector

All I wanted was a cool breeze fanning my favorite place to read. Along with it, came a new collection!

A few years ago, I decided that we needed a ceiling fan in our screened porch. Our porch is the place we entertain for casual summer dinners, sip coffee and read the Sunday papers, and escape from the mounting laundry with a book. It made sense to prolong the screened porch season with an inexpensive ceiling fan.

"It won't be a big deal," I told my husband over dinner. "You can pick up an indoor/outdoor fan at Lowe's for fifty or sixty bucks. A decent electrician should be able to install it in a couple of hours. A hundred or a hundred and twenty dollars later and there we are with our icy glasses of lemonade, chilling out on our breezy porch." My husband agreed with the concept, but pointed out that our porch had a dropped ceiling which was pretty low to begin with. A fan would either chop your head off or hurricane the reading material right out of your hands. . .

We decided to go ahead anyway, and like all remodeling projects that start out with, "It's no big deal, all we need is. . .", it took hours and hours and hundreds and hundreds. We took the ceiling out and had electric for the fan and two galvanized ceiling pendants put in. We painted the rafters, and put in a shelf with a scalloped valance to disguise the intersection between the brick wall and the wood ceiling. It looks fabulous, sort of like a fishing cabin from the 1940's, and the best part is the huge new area I get to fill with things I never knew I wanted to collect, like minnow buckets, old wooden sporting equipment, and thermoses.