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don’t put my stuff upon no shelf
21 Jan 07
As anyone who has visited our humble home can attest, we have a bit of a storage problem. One of the reasons the every day project has sputtered is because I’ve had a few ideas for ameliorating this storage problem but keep running into obstacles. Not just obstacles, actually; part of the problem is that any attempt to rearrange stuff in a house casts light on other situations that snowball into something insurmountable. (Is that a mixed metaphor? I suppose something that snowballs should be unstoppable. Anyways. . . .)
For example, I’ve been thinking about putting a small shelf in the tv room upstairs. Said shelf would be a games shelf first and foremost, but would also be a place to put some of the overflow of books, at least until we establish our weeding criteria. However, to put it bluntly, the tv room is rather desolate. Since moving into this house, we’ve done very little to erase the presence of its previous owner, whose tastes rather differed from our own. This tv room was a girl’s bedroom. It’s a bit smaller than the other upstairs rooms because of a previous “renovation” that expanded the bathroom at the expense of this bedroom. The new wall that was created is wood-panelled with the stuff of 70s rec-room nostalgia. The other walls are a dirty mauvish colour adorned by a gruesome wallpaper trim—a nasty 4 inches of abstract dusty-rose blobs and grey “brushstrokes” with a vaguely Greek border. There’s just so much to do.
To make a long story short, I’ve been looking around for appropriate shelves. Those I have found that are kind of attractive would just make the room’s desolation more apparent. Home-made—sorry, DIY would do, but we don’t have the right combination of scraps in the basement. So today I checked out Zeller’s. I’ll be damned if I’ll spend $50 on a piece of crap pressboard thing laminated with vinyl “wood grain”. I’m stalemated, it seems, or at least playing out a patient middle game. To console myself, I went to the LCBO and spent my gift cards. More on that later!
Posted by pzed on January 21, 2007 at 6.02pm
Categories: every day
Comments on "don’t put my stuff upon no shelf"
We’ve had good shelf-luck with the Home Depot (it takes all my willpower to not write “despot” — oops, done now) in the form of their cheapest just-pine shelfboards (though they do sell the laminated stuff for nearly-as-cheap, with a routered front edge, no less), and with Ikea if the budget’s slightly higher. It really depends on how much of a DIYer you are, and if you can stand to look at plain old pine or want something fancier.
Posted by Emer on January 22, 2007 at 10.42am :: link
Sounds like the room can’t be fixed just by adding something. I’d say you have to clear it out completely and redo all the surfaces (usually this just means painting) to clean your mind of the stylistic fog that is preventing you from seeing the true path this room should take. After that, I’d say “don’t neglect lighting.” Even a beautiful room is going to look ugly if you’ve got it under that 1 omnidirectional 75-watt bulb in the ceiling. Or, if all that seems like too much work, here’s a really good book about decorating just by rearranging the stuff you already have: http://www.amazon.com/Decorating-Good-Step-Step-Rearranging/dp/0609803719 Good luck!
Posted by mjb on January 23, 2007 at 8.56pm :: link
believe it or not, you have to think like a garbage man. see that apartment building way over there? check out the garbage area near the end of the months. people are always tossing out good furniture and parts. did you know you can convert a dresser into a bookcase. and because it’s lower, you can put two on top of each other and make a unique, cool designing, like a tv/gamers case. Neat, eh. Yes I am Canadian…hehehehe. Good Luck!
Posted by muriel on March 24, 2007 at 9.02pm :: link
