it’s amazing what moving a little furniture will do for your outlook.
i’ve always complained that our apartment, which is nice-sized with a huge kitchen by relatively inexpensive one bedroom manhattan apartment standards, nevertheless feels crowded and cluttered.
who knew that making the room smaller would solve the problem?
in case you were wondering, the gay design gene kind of skipped a generation with me. i can be creative, but not so much with arranging furniture and color selection and patterns and all that. kirk’s much better at it, although to be honest he’s not exactly even a fraction of the fab five himself.
but he had a brilliant idea. use our bookcases to break up the living room into two areas: traditional living room with couch and tv and all; and a dining area.
so we did, into approximately 2/3 for living and 1/3 for dining. and it made all the difference in how the apartment feels. the living area is very cocoon-y. we took the armrests off the futon and just made it a platform on the floor against the wall with some new throw pillows. very comfy in a spartan japanese kind of way. i may never be convinced to buy a couch. and the tv and stereo sounds much better down on the floor, and the air conditioner is no longer constantly droning into kirk’s right ear. and we took the back off one of the bookcases, and doubled up the books so that we have more shelf space.
and the 1/3 has the piano and the dining table which we may actually now dine at instead of pile stuff on. and when i’m in the living room, i can’t see into the kitchen and all the clutter that resides there, so i feel much less frantic. clutter and stuff everywhere are very unsettling to me. my ideal apartment would have practically no furniture and no visible stuff–just storage with everything put away. but this is a nice compromise.
the kitchen is very cluttered, by the way, but only because we have so many pots and pans and ingredients and cans and whatnot, all of which we use because we cook all the time. it’s an enormous kitchen for a new york apartment, but not so big compared to the suburbs or utah or wherever. your trailer home probably has a bigger kitchen than we do, so you can’t even imagine what passes for a kitchen in most manhattan apartments. so i’m not complaining space-wise; it’s just that there’s a lot of square feet in our kitchen, but not many cabinets or much counter space. so we have shelves and more shelves, and everything sits out in the open, and it perpetually looks junky even though we clean constantly, just because there so much of everything.
but now i can’t see it from the living room, so the aforementioned frantic etc. is no more.
and, even better, we’ve hung a curtain in the kitchen doorway, so kirk can open the window and use an exhaust fan when he’s baking, and i can sit in the rest of the apartment in air-conditioned comfort.
home sweet home.
indeed.