Scruffy Hospitality: the Photo Shoot

I had planned to take pictures all Saturday, but I only took pictures before everyone arrived.  Yesterday's post which described both the event and my approach to scruffy hospitality got to be long, so I decided to save the pictures for a later post.

As I paged through them, I thought about the Martha Stewart publication and how my house is hardly the location for a photo shoot.  And then I thought, hey, it's time for a magazine that shows how we really live!  Here, without further ado, is Kristin Berkey-Abbott's Scruffy Hospitality:

And a close up of the table:

Moving the dining room table into the living room meant we could transform the dining room into a little sitting room nook.

We don't have a lot of flat surfaces, so I improvised serving space:

If you could see under the sarongs, you'd see work tables with lots of splashed paint and ugly plastic with nicks from saws.

I thought that people might decide to swim, so my spouse put a variety of beach towels on top of the old gas grill that we might some day turn into a charcoal or wood grill.

I told my spouse that I couldn't imagine many ways that the gathering could have gone better, at least not in our current reality.  For example, I'd love to add several feet of width to each room so that people could have circulated more easily.  But I can't make that happen.  I'd like to have giant misters so that it didn't feel quite as hot outside.  But that's cost prohibitive.

No, I will remember the baby drawing on the tablecloth quilt with a gazpacho coated spoon and smile.  I will say a prayer of thanks for the stain remover which took that gazpacho right out of the machine washable quilt.  I will feel deep gratitude for the fact that although I somehow detached the thermostat from the wall, my spouse got it reattached, and I got it re-programmed and the house eventually cooled down to where it needed to be.

And most of all, I'm thankful for friends who are good sports and such good company!