Mother, daughter redefine blended home
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last of two installments.
In the large mirror in the breakfast nook is the painted word “Together,” a fitting motto for Sherry Lopatic and her daughter and son-in-law, Rachel and Michael Tidwell, who merged their two homes into one a year ago in Choctaw.
“How’s that working out?” I asked.
“The upside is so great,” Rachel said. “We all have a much better place, and aren’t spending as much.”
But what I really wanted to know was how did all the furniture get along.
“You would think, since we were going from two houses that totaled 2,900 square feet to one house with over 3,000, we wouldn’t have had any problems,” Rachel said, “but we had many.”
Though their three personalities meshed nicely, as did their blended menagerie of five dogs and two cats, their combined furniture not so much.
“Believe me, deciding whose furniture, and decorations would go where — or just go — was a challenge,” Sherry said.
Michael, who’s gunning for son-in-law of the year, wisely left those discussions to the women. “I had no strong feelings about any of it,” he said. Well, except for the dining room table.
The new house, which they had custom built, has a 450-square-foot mother-in-law suite, which Sherry has furnished completely with her things. Some of her other furnishings, they agreed, would go in the main house.
Therein lay the rub. For example, the contemporary bar-height dining table was a favorite of Michael’s. “We’d just bought it, and it was nonnegotiable,” Rachel said.
Sherry argued that a high table would be harder when children came along. Besides, it wasn’t her style. She preferred her dining room table.
“That’s when I pulled my card and said, ‘Well it won’t be going in your area,’ ” Rachel said.
“I gave in a little more,” Sherry said, “because I had my area where could do what I wanted.” But both sides made sacrifices.
Sherry also wanted to keep her retro Formica diner-style kitchen table with red vinyl chairs.
Sherry held firm, however, to her open-shelf pine hutch. “It was one of my favorite things, and was coming no matter what,” she said. Today, the hutch resides by the family room fireplace.
Once they’d hashed out what would go where, they held a garage sale, where Sherry sold “probably 60 to 70 percent of my stuff,” including her well-used sectional, the retro kitchen table and chairs, her dresser and queensize bed. She bought a double that fits better.
If you ask Sherry, the house today has 60 percent of Rachel and Michael’s belongings, and 40 percent of hers. Rachel, however, claims it’s the reverse.
“Merging households isn’t for everyone, but it works for us,” said Rachel, who with her mom offers the following advice for anyone considering it:
• SYNC YOUR STYLE.
Sherry and Rachel share a similar taste in decor, which helped a lot. • HEAD ARGUMENTS
OFF AT THE DOOR. The women created a scaled floor plan and cut out furniture pieces to scale to decide what would go where long before the movers came. Thus, most arguments were waged and resolved beforehand. • VETO POWER. Besides letting each party claim a few nonnegotiable items to keep, both sides also had a limited number of vetoes.
• COMPROMISE. “One of our main disagreements was over blinds,” said Sherry, who wanted them on every window. Rachel was adamant about not having blinds. They settled. Sherry has them in her area, but the rest of the house has none.
• SOMETIMES THE ANSWER IS NEITHER.
Because neither party had furniture that fit the main living area, they sold their sofas and sectionals, and Rachel and Michael bought a new sofa, love seat and oversize chair that finished the room.
• KEEP YOUR PERSPECTIVE. “Ask yourself how important, in the scheme of things, getting your way really is,” Sherry said. “Any time you decide to live together or blend households, you need to be willing to bend.”
Looking back on their year of transition, Sherry sums it up like this: “All in all, this was a good idea. We still have discussions, like, when holidays come around and we need to decide on that seasons’ decorations, but no blood has been shed, and we are living peacefully and happily — together.”