Tag Archives: furniture

Life With Furniture

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I’ve never had what I’d call a profound relationship with a piece of furniture. (Except for my bed. It’s an example of Amish woodworking, some kind of hybrid of a sleigh bed and a mission bed. Our relationship was shattered when we bought a mattress that came with an alarm. Unfortunately, the salesman neglected to tell us what tune it played. When we woke the next morning to the cheerful computerized strains of “It’s a Small World,” we swore a solemn oath to rip out both the alarm mechanism and the salesman’s larynx. But I digress.)

All that changed when I broke my ankle in two places. (I should specify. Two bones in my ankle were broken. I broke them in one place, my study, at the same time. But I digress again.) Since then, I have been living in my study and bonding with the recliner.

The thing is, I have to wear a giant black boot on my right leg. Despite the fact that the injury was to my ankle, the boot starts just below my knee. It features a plastic skeleton and exoskeleton, a foam liner, and far too much Velcro. It weighs, by my estimation, about eight pounds. I walk with a limp, not because of the broken ankle (well, not just because of that), but because I have no shoe (singular) with a sole as thick as the boot’s to wear on my left foot. And the recliner is the only furniture that can truly accommodate my needs.

Our house has a second floor, where the bed lives. But I can’t climb the stairs. Climbing them was iffy even when I used a cane (before the ankle accident but after the knee replacement). I’m living in the first-floor study that was the scene of my injury, and giving daily thanks that there’s a bathroom on both floors.

Dan brought a recliner down from upstairs. It doesn’t match the “decor,” and it doesn’t recline all the way. I can extend the footrest to horizontal, but reclining the back and headrest requires a maneuver that I’m physically unable to accomplish. It involves throwing your entire body weight against the backrest. (I have plenty of body weight, but not the strength to fling it with sufficient force. But I digress some more.)

I can at least sleep with my head supported and my legs straight rather than dangling. I sit in the recliner with my legs elevated to read, watch TV, and use my phone. To get to my real computer, I have to sit in my desk chair, where my legs dangle. (Evidently, dangling allows fluid to accumulate in my legs. It happened once. My thighs looked like Christmas hams. My cankles and the tops of my feet looked like puff pastry. My toes looked like Vienna sausages. But I digress even more.)

I see my surgeon on the 8th, and hope to graduate from the boot to something less confining. I was so happy to get the boot in the first place, as it allowed my foot at last to bear weight. (Ever tried using a walker with a knee sling? Don’t.) Now I can’t wait to get rid of the most recent torture device.

I’ll take the boot and the recliner, though, for as long as necessary. One benefit to the arrangement is that our cat Toby loves to lie on my lap as I recline and sleep there to his heart’s content. It makes my recliner extra-cozy and comfy, even if I can’t sleep lying all the way down.

A Room of My Own

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So, we bought a house, a couple of decades ago. It had three bedrooms, which seems a lot, since there’s only my husband and myself. We seldom had overnight guests, and when we did there was a pull-out sofa bed.

What did we do with the two extra rooms? Media center? Exercise room? Yoga studio?

No. One became my study. I needed a place to write my stories, articles, blogs, books, and draft my novel. Someplace where I wouldn’t be disturbed (or could be as disturbed as I like).

Then, of course, so my husband shouldn’t be left out, the other spare room became a study, too. It wasn’t a “man cave,” since neither one of us believes in those things. But it was a place where he could store his curios and fossils, watch TV or do research on the computer, hang his favorite artworks, house his books and DVDs, and just generally kick back.

Then along came the tornado that destroyed our house. It gave me the opportunity to start all over with my study, make it into my refuge as well as my writing space, and decorate it from the ground up – literally.

I’ve included a few pictures of my study for illustration purposes. It’s not really as orange as it looks in the photos, more the clay-like color of used bricks. The carpet is a deep tan. The ceiling, blinds, and windowsills are white. The furniture is a collection of different colored woods, including both new and used pieces. Several of them have electrical outlets and USB ports to accommodate my collection of electronic spaghetti.

Here’s a few highlights of my study:

  • a desk and desk chair, of course, facing a window
  • a bookcase, of course
  • a Mac desktop computer
  • a two-drawer wooden file cabinet that serves as a printer stand
  • my Cornell diploma and an EdPress award
  • a comfy chair in a color called spice, just a shade or two deeper than the walls
  • several pieces of art, including a piece of calligraphy by Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi and a drawing by Debbie Ohi with a quote from Neil Gaiman
  • a Venice carnival-style cat mask
  • a TV and a stand for it, which will also hold my Mr. Coffee machine
  • a cat tree by the window (the window sills are also wide enough for them)
  • assorted plush animals, knick-knacks, and such travel souvenirs as survived the tornado
  • a lamp and a tissue box made to look like old books
  • a concrete armadillo, which serves as my doorstop

I don’t have as many books as I used to, which I know to some is a sacrilege, but now I have them on my e-readers. I still have print copies of The Annotated Alice, The Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan, and several signed mystery and science fiction novels. My CD collection is likewise gone, replaced by iTunes on my computer and my iPod. I have a few DVDs that are special to me, which will reside in my TV stand, along with more plush animals and knick-knacks.

My study is far from finished. I still don’t know how to disguise or hide the powerstrips. Some of the artwork needed restoring, and much of it still needs hanging. My bookshelf is new (to me) and needs to be filled. Somewhere in the basement, I have a decorative wall-hanging brass shelf that I haven’t quite figured out where to put.

At any rate, it’s still a work in progress, but rapidly taking shape. It’s warm and cozy, relatively quiet (after the neighbors get their houses built, I mean). And it feels good to have, as Virginia Woolf said, “a room of one’s own.”

 

Rearranging the Furniture in My Head

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I knew a woman once who, when she was at business conventions and besieged by requests, saturated with meetings, and overwhelmed by the exhibit hall, stated that she had to retreat to her hotel room “to rearrange the furniture in my head.” I thought that was a great way to put it. We all have furniture in our heads and sometimes it’s necessary to place it in areas where we won’t trip over it and bruise ourselves. Or there may be more furniture than we need and we must jettison some of it.

Now, however, rearranging the furniture in my head has become more literal. I’m basically in the position of having to furnish an entire house, and indeed to be involved in planning the shapes as well as the contents of the rooms, since our house was destroyed by a natural disaster.

This is challenging. We loved our house the way it was, with only a couple of changes that we could envision making. We have an architect working on it and he’s made some pretty fine suggestions. He has told us that we can add amenities such as skylights and bay windows, plus making what had been a deck into a screened porch or “catio.” We’re also willing to trade some storage space to have a larger downstairs bathroom. But even if we left the floor plan basically the way it was, there are still a lot of decisions to be made.

It’s the furniture that has me puzzled. All our life, our house has been decorated in what my parents liked to call “Early Married Junk.” (We’ve been married for more than 30 years and that’s still our decor.) Now, having to pick out things that actually go together is stressing me out.

Choosing color schemes is no picnic, for example. We barely had a color scheme for our wedding, starting with off-white so the guests wouldn’t snicker. This was in the days before weddings had themes or groom’s cakes or favors for the guests or designer cocktails. We had a cake decorated in our colors and called it a wedding day.

But now it seems that every room must have a color scheme and a “look.” Boho? Country? Modern? Classic? Retro? Anything but ’50s, no matter what my husband says.

Saying goodbye to our original kitchen decor will not be a hardship. The house was designed in the ’70s and the kitchen was done in orange. Countertops so orange you could lose a pumpkin if you placed it on one of the surfaces. Psychedelic patterned indoor-outdoor orange carpeting that caused hallucinations if you stared at too long. I don’t know what we’ll settle on, but that’s not it. Generally speaking, I think carpeting in the kitchen is a Bad Idea, psychedelic orange or not. Linoleum, tile, press-n-stick “wood” – nearly anything else.

Once I tried to decorate a bedroom. I was going for a travel theme with bright, yellow-gold walls and our assorted souvenirs as accents, with jungle print or brown, rust, and gold bedding. I managed to talk my husband into light oak for the bed, but couldn’t convince him to ditch his cherry chest-on-chest. It was an antique, but also a dark, hulking presence against one wall. We had compromised on each of us decorating one half of the room’s edges. My half had a rattan teacart and etagère. His had classical paintings of naked nymphs, plus brooding African masks that seemed to follow your every move. Admittedly, they did complement the travel theme, but they were still unnerving.

Now we will have a master bedroom, two baths, two studies, a great room, and a kitchen/dinette to deal with. By the time the house is built, I may just decorate every room with padded walls. Until we actually have rooms to put things in, I’ll keep browsing decorating websites and rearranging the furniture-to-be in my head.