Apartment Therapy

(September 15, 2008)

OK, I did it.

I took some of the money we'd saved (we want to buy a house in the next 2 years) and I spent a modest sum on some home improvements. It took many weeks of shopping around online for the killer deals, then last week I put in for taking today off work, getting a Zipcar and making some serious errands happen.

Yes, IKEA. Also Target, Homegoods and My Bob's Discount Furniture. Yes I'm on the other side of 35 years old and still buying discount furniture I have to put together myself, but hey, you know, it looks good and I still have money in my bank account. Armed with a list and mapquested directions, I was ready for battle.

I wasn't going to do it. I was going to just keep on saving for a house.But like Jean Kerr wrote in Please Don't Eat the Daisies, there are two times when you absolutely must redecorate. The first (and I'm paraphrasing here) is when you have the money. The second is when you don't have the money but if you have to look at that same throw pillow one more minute you'll go smack out of your mind.

The first part was all purging and cleaning. When you're dealing with a small space and a small budget, you've got to be smart about what to keep and what to purge. Our place has always had a certain "shabby chic" flair, but last month I looked around and figured out which areas tilted too much towards "shabby." The trouble spots, so to speak.

The bedroom. Good god almighty, who LIVES here? First of all, Joey and I both seem to generate mounds of clothes on the floor in front of our closets. When I say it's cluttered, we're talking a mountain of clothes that actually prevented my short arms from REACHING my closet. The excess had to go, so we both purged two giant Glad bags of things-we'll-never-wear-again. I laundered everything that was left and our 3-bin laundry cart was totally empty. When everything was up off the floor, I vacuumed such a colony of dust bunnies that they could have started their own Discovery Channel series had they not been murdered by my sweet corner-nozzle action. Sneezing about a hundred and fifty times a minute the whole time, I got the floor spotless. From this exercise I deemed the main problem to be: the laundry.

With no laundry room, anywhere you put the mesh drawstring bags is simply going to look shabby. It doesn't matter if it's the bathroom or the bedroom or the hallway -- you're quite literally airing your dirty laundry, and it isn't pretty.

So I got this:

It's 27-inches across, so it will fit into our long, narrow bathroom. It has two bins inside, so unlike our current laundry holder, this amount of skankified undies and ripe T-shirts is about two loads. When it's full, we do laundry. New rule. Under the current regime I have enough mesh laundry bags for six, eight, ten loads. And I have done that much laundry at once. As recently as last weekend. No more! Stopping the madness feels great.

Related to the new hamper somewhat because of its proximity in the bathroom -- the over-the-bowl shelf. Target calls it an "etagere" but I just call it an over-the-bowl shelf. Well, we had one, an old chrome-plated one that I brought one with me from Summer Street when I moved in. That was some five years ago and the thing, originally about $19 at Target, is rusted to hell and gone, and rickety besides, plus it's just open spindley shelves so nothing sits flush (ha, get it) without wobbling -- to remedy that I put down two pieces of cut-to-size corkboard to act as a more sturdy surface.

Chrome and corkboard. I told you, shabby-chic.

So I got this, a more sturdy version and matches the hamper.

The hamper I found online at organize.com, and the etagere was picked up today in person from Target.

It's so cool. I still have to put it together though.

But right now I need to take a shower. It has been a crazy busy day, and I stink.