Features: The Ultimate Philadelphia Dream House: I Love It, It’s Perfect, Now Change It

 That didn’t happen. We are both Type A, and we immediately went into Def-con 3 house-search mode, and called the Waspy and very smart real estate couple Marilou and Peter Buffum at Eichler & Moffley Realtors. We looked at four houses, and fell in love with a 150-year-old farmhouse near Blue Bell; it had a spacious addition with high ceilings, a gorgeous kitchen, and room for all the kids’ instruments and toys and bikes. But a structural problem came up during inspection that we couldn’t resolve with the sellers. I sadly pored over my laminated magazine pages and their airy, pale mixes of modern art and antiques that would have looked so good in that old farmhouse. 

Then I looked around the townhouse and felt more hopeful, realizing that when we eventually mixed our stuff, we might actually be able to have that look. John already had the modern art, with some paintings and lithographs I loved; his comfy living room furniture would look great in a future family room. Meanwhile, my old house had sold but not yet settled, so I occasionally went there to mow the lawn and try to find missing shoes.

 Then, one weekend, my adorable six-year-old stepson had a terrible stomachache. Miserable and in his pajamas, he couldn’t eat more than a few bites of his chocolate-chip toaster waffles. We heard a strange, muffled noise in the living room and found him pathetically covered in brown vomit from head to toe, as was one of the love seats. Twenty minutes later, after a bath and one sip of Gatorade, he threw up all over the other love seat. Then Tyler, our older boy, came in from the stream with mud caked on pretty much every part of his body. The cat did something unfortunate in the dining room. I started collecting very different pages from Elle Decor. Suddenly, everything I liked was much darker — in fact, a lot of the fabric and upholstery I found myself drawn to was now chocolate brown. It was the color of puke.