All I did today was move my two small bookcases back into the living room and behind the loveseat so they form sort of a sofa-table thing between the loveseat and the wall. They’re cheap white laminate things, and they match the white rattan part of the sofa, and of course the white paint on the wall, so they don’t stand out, but I can put things on them. Then I put all my ratty old paperbacks and other books I don’t read that much back in them before moving the loveseat into place. Since the loveseat weighs almost nothing I can get to them if I want to read one of my old scifi novels or something, but now I don’t have to look at their awful tatty covers and so on. The loveseat itself is rather hideous, but it only cost twenty-five dollars at the used furniture store, and it’s comfortable, so it will do until I can afford a nicer replacement. Which the way things going will probably be never, so I am thinking of simply investing in a slipcover.
This is all preliminary to the Great Bedroom Makeover. The next step is hanging the curtains I bought — they are “tropical green,” a light green that isn’t too light, but I am over forest green. The color scheme is going to be the green and a light-to-medium blond or honey-colored wood for the furniture; I need to get a dresser, and possibly a night table — I don’t want a lot of furniture crowding the space, though. I might skip the night table — currently I am using a set of three Mission-style nesting tables as a night table, and if that works out I’ll just keep them. I am getting a new desk, though. I am so over this huge L-shaped thing I bought. I thought I’d need all the desktop space to write on, but as it turned out I have only used it for piling crap on, so it was just wasted money. I am going to buy a smaller desk or a corner desk, and a two-drawer file cabinet, which I have always needed. I can put the scanner on top of that, and the printer on the desk now that I have the LCD monitor taking up way less space than the CRT behemoth I had before. My computer has a rolling stand so it doesn’t need any desktop space, and I plan to replace that anyway with something smaller, like a MiniMac. The goal is to make most of my bedroom feel like a bedroom instead of an office/storage room where I happen to sleep. I am also going to replace the ricketty metal futon frame with a simple wooden bed frame I saw on the internet. Maybe I’ll even get rid of the futon and buy a real mattress, but the kind I want is probably beyond my income level (I want a pillowtop with individually-wrapped coils so it doesn’t bounce every time I so much as wiggle a toe — that’s why I sleep on a futon now; it has no springs at all, at least).
I had planned to take apart the L-shaped desk today (take the corner piece out anyway, and put both sections next to each other so that the part the computer sits on no longer juts out into the window area), but apparently a few weeks of being driven to work instead of walking have taken their toll, and I am just beat all to hell. Tomorrow I am taking a semi-break — I am going camera shopping (the Camera of My Dreams is on sale, and I am going to see if I can get it), and I may take a detour into the second-hand furniture shops, which are on the way to the bus stop, to see if I can find a chest of drawers or dresser in not too bad condition that fits my wants and needs and isn’t too grodily Eighties-style and doesn’t smell like dry rot — my clothes are going in it after all. If I can find a second-hand dresser that will help me in the budget department.
The dream, I guess, is to re-create my childhood room, but better, as the childhood bedroom was refitted out of our long and narrow and unused dining room in the old 1920s-era Boomer house I grew up in, and bore the marks of both Seventies fashion and my father’s inadequate handyman skills. The plywood bookshelves he installed for me soon buckled and splintered and came loose from their nails because he had no idea what he was doing, the dark wood panelling had huge brown recluse spiders making use of the ample cracks between the boards, the wardrobe/closet he built me out of unvarnished, non-laminated pressboard succumbed to the damp of our humid, non-airconditioned house and began to sag, and so on — and did I mention the pale green fuzzy rug and avocado green bedspread? But there was the tree in the front yard outside my window, and my mother made curtains out of sheets with this art-nouveau-meets-Sixties-pop-art design of trees that looked rather like those in Tolkien’s own painting of Bilbo riding a barrel down the Forest River (which so far I can’t find on the internet anywhere so I will scan it up later).
I couldn’t do any of this if I had a car now. I’d be paying car payments, insurance payments, and for gas at today’s high prices. I do plan to get a car some time this year, but I want to get the house at least semi-livable and get a few other things that I put off all the years I was driving because I couldn’t afford it due to the cost of owning and operating a car. Currently not having a car is simply an inconvenience, and perhaps it was always so.
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