Lighting

We just bought lighting for the bonus room that we want to make into a steampunk Explorer's club style rec room for our TV and dance floor and whatever else strikes our fancy. We bought the single lamp, the 3 lamp straight section and a 6 lamp adjustable section. This lighting has brass accents with springs and screams steampunk on a budget that we can all afford. We are still painting and carpeting this room but our reward will be hanging this wonderful lighting which will MAKE this room!

More lamps

Here is a fun Etsy find from RizBerry, Etsy is my current shopping obsession. I LOVE these insulators as pendant lamps. Makes me wish I had asked to buy one from former owners of my house, who collected these to make my own. Great idea that is both steampunk and smart recycling.

Steampunk fans and lighting

To my recent delight both shopping and reading other people's blogs is the discover that wether the average person notices or not modern culture is slowly becoming infused with steampunk style. From high end designers to Restoration Hardware and even in Lowes and Target its easy to find steampunk style that with a few personal touches can be made really wonderful looking. This is fan is my current favorite item off the shelf item I've seen during our recent shopping outings. The design reminds me a propeller blade. Add a few accents from the craft store and it could look really amazing at a daily price range. Lowes is full of other great lighting and fan options at very afforadle prices!

The Bonus room

This is probably the biggest challenge in the house. This is an enclosed and finished patio that the previous owners had set up as a living room. They also had a lot of collectables and the glass shelves were lovingly hand built by the original home owner to display a set of 1960s fancy liqueur bottles, the LARGE ones in all kinds of strange shapes. Unfortunately while well designed the shelves are not good for much other display purpose. We want to use it as a living room and rec room with a Steampunk style explorer's club theme to it. Fenn is a geologist so we have literally shelves of rocks and other specimens to display and are inspired by many of the naturalists posts on MySteampunkHouse blog. However we are also avid dancers and have a ballroom dance floor to squeeze in this room as well. So we are looking to liven up the old wall heater, take down the mirrors, sand and paint the walls and see where that gets us.

The living room

The front room is the living room and dining room area. This room is 1950s peppermint meltaway green with white door boards and floor boards. We love the accents but with the green exterior this is a bit much. The plan here is to remove the popcorn ceiling, warm the room up with tan paint, add crown molding and wainscotting to bring the room back a few decades. The previous owners left us brass lamps and light switch covers that are in the plan to bring in the steam touches. Our living room furniture is all victorian antiques so it should all tie together, we hope.

The Starting Point

Our ideal house to steampunk out would have been a true craftsman but in the San Franciso bay area those are hard to find in a location a) we could afford, b) wasn't a terrible commute or c) wasn't run down beyond our price range ability to fix up. Although we searched for months with the challenges of modern home loans we did not find this dreamed of starting point. What we did find was a 1951 house with some updates from loving owners and nice expansion in a great location with wonderful views from every window. We fell in love with this house the moment we toured it, it just felt like home. So we jumped on this opportunity to buy it. Our decorating desires now is to bring this house into steampunk style.

Inspiration comes in strange places

Where did our quest begin? Oddly enough it began in Disneyland in the new house of tomorrow now called the "Innovention House". This is to me the steampunk dream house. This ideal home is a fantastic mixture of arts and crafts style decor and wood accents with huge flat screen displays as changing artwork in each room. This home has beautiful technology in every room including automatic computer controlled window coverings, fireplace, stereo, model train (naturally, it IS Disneyland) and even an ASIMO home helper robot. It would take a Disney budget to make this home a reality for us working folks but the concepts are fantastic and got us started dreaming. Here is the link of you want to see the official webpage but be warned this is a big and rather slow flash site. http://dreamhome.disney.go.com/media/ap/dreamhome/index.html

Dreaming of a Steampunk Home

Where to begin? My husband Fenn, and I, Evie, are two intrepid explorers seeking to create a steampunk home. Our vision of steampunk is form, function and beauty where technology works for us in elegant and wonderful ways. The steampunk ideal teased and flirted with us at a friend's wedding and our vision for the house of tomorrow is borrowed from the house of yesterday with the technology of today. We have been home shopping for months and finally we found a suitable starting point. This was no mean feat in the CA Bay Area even in a recession so here we are with a 1951 CA house, our canvas for our steampunk dreams.