department of the interior: home decor

I've been trying to put the tv ACROSS from the couch instead of lengthwise from it, but it doesn't work in the room and I've never really liked orienting everything around the tv anyway. Although that probably IS what we'll use the liv rm for the most. Maybe not, if the furniture encourages other kinds of gathering.

i spent all of sunday home-decoring. went to a huuuuuuuge antiques fair and bought bedside tables (mid-century, kind of a browny-mustard with a dark green fine leather inlay and pretty, simple gold leaf design around edge, big surface with a shelf underneath and rounded ends) and a maple dresser from the 1890s with OMG GLOVE BOXES built into the top!! this thing is so cool: the glove boxes are small with hinged lids on either side of the dresser (which i'm using as jewelry boxes). all for under $200!!

moved everything round in our bedroom and lounge, as i'm constantly on a quest to maximize space and make it look less cluttered. i figured out a way to split our living room into both a living room and a studio, which is working out great.

i also found a great telephone table a few weeks ago that matches our bedside tables, for $15. using as a cool coffee table.

yeah i decided that desk was too small and i'd go crazy. now have to figure something else out! i was kind of selling myself on the high dining table but then i realized it probably isn't practical to buy high chairs (thinking about if the chairs needed to be used for anything else).

yeah my living room is funny because there's a huge window facing the couch right now. window tv? i have been wondering if i should move the couch to the wall but i feel like chairs where the couch is now would be a little weird.

those tables sound great, justine!

and yeah i should look at salvation army but i have to wait til i make more friends who will help me move the stuff haw!

current bedside table: two moving boxes stacked on top of each other with a table cloth over them.

TZA, there are a lot of people trying to get rid of "cafe" or "bar-style" high tables on craigslist NYC, and to be honest the all look like they were a really bad idea. If the seating is either too low or too high to sit down in WHILE carrying a drink or plate of food, it's a bad idea. :) And as a short person, I always have to HIKE myself up into those barstool-height chairs, so I hate them.

yeah, and they are usually half-backed... which is annoying.

right now i am on office quest, tho. how do i shot perfect desk + filing system for v v little $.

Second-hand table plus Ikea file cabinet underneath in a bright color.

"Cheap" desks are cheap, and ugly, and won't be attractive once they're worn a little, or be useful for anything besides Being a Desk because they're configured for files and computer keyboards. Get a multi-use table instead.

yeah. ugh. it's so much work. meanwhile i'm sitting on my couch when i do work from home and i gotta say that is uh... not really conducive to efficient productivity.

also my couch is comfortable but now i kind of wish i'd gone with the less comfortable but sleeker looking one. oh well. it was like $300 more.

i use an ikea dining room table for my desk, i love it.

BJÖRKUDDEN

it's shaped like bjork, and it has udders underneath in case i need a snack of icelandic milk

i'm working on finding a new desk, too. we currently have this old wooden desk, and i think it's really ugly, but my husband sanded it down and painted it dark green (his favourite colour) a long time ago and has a huge sentimental attachment to it. but i want something bigger and with those little sliding pieces that create extra desk space, like really old desks have.

was thinking of getting a big vika table and putting some cabinets under it, then just clearing it off and centering it in the room if people came over for eating but i kind of hate the idea of having to rearrange furniture to entertain. still undecided as to whether dining area will be office or dining. leaning towards office...

our dining room is a bike workshop :(

update to last year when I painted those black shelves (upthread) - I actually scored 4 Ikea Billy bookcases in black in perfect condition for free a few months ago, so now my whole apartment has beautiful, matching black shelves. Bliss.

I also found a functionable but not gorgeous desk on my street this summer and replaced my desk - this one is bigger and matches the colours of my fiancee's desk - we have a second bedroom converted into a study/library and we each have half the room, with shelves & desks arranged like there is a mirror in the centre of the room. I think it's pretty cute.

yeah i want a big big desk that i can move away from the wall so we can both work at it, plus it'll be easy when i'm working with big sheets of paper

that sounds like a dream!
xpost

i got this coffee table except with light-colored wood

http://img1.classistatic.com/cps/kj/090907/323r5/5500l5j_19.jpeg

and it is enormoouuusss

ooooooh <3

i need chairs. why are chairs so expensive?

btw i got super cheap desk and side table and a 4-square expedit the other day. it's a sickness. but my house is slowly looking better!

if you squint you can't tell it's all crap.

I only have one chair! Haw. I thrifted it. It's some kind of old chair that you're supposed to hang ties ont he back of (???) and the bottom opens up and I keep sheet music in it. It's kind of a ladderback chair.

xp don't feel bad about buying 'crap' furniture: my motto right now is to buy stuff that i like the look of, and for cheap. we don't know where we're gonna be in a year's time, and if we're moving cross-country - good chance of this - i don't wanna have to lug tons of furniture just cuz i paid a lot of money for it. i wanna feel free just to ditch it if i have to, no regrets.

keep meaning to take photos of my awesome new furniture but keep forgetting. the 'glove boxes' on the dresser are just the coolest things ever.

i really want a dressing table now

yeah i was just thinking about that. i really need one

getting ready standing in the bathroom feels so dorm life

yeah i usually sit on my bed or the couch but you know, i'd love a nice space to put all that girly crap and have morning ritual time.

yeah, would be really nice to stick photos and stuff on the side of the mirror, and have like an atomizer sitting there doing nothing, and all my hair-doing stuff not crammed into a box.

i need some desk ideas.

currently, our workshop is 3/4 of our living room and we have an old wooden desk in there. but we're hopefully moving soon to a place where our workshop will have its own room, so i want to buy a much larger desk - actually, probably more of a table than a desk, since i'm not concerned with having drawers and i want me and ytth to both be able to sit at opposite sides of it.

i want it big enough for both of us to work at and to maybe have folding legs or some other feature where it comes apart to make it easy to move.

is ikea my best bet for this kind of thing?

so psyched to move into new place soon and set up my own home. it has some pretty paint on the wall in the bedroom already.

IKEA is perfect, J, because they have a lot of table tops with replaceable/interchangeable legs, some trestles, some shelving things that you can rest the table on...different colors, and so on.

yeah we just stopped by there today and found some pretty suitable stuff. psyched to buy new furniture!! gonna get rid of our shitty tv stand, get a new couch, new desk, some new shelving... fingers crossed we get the AMAZING place we applied for today.

anyone have experience with uv film for windows?

This may seem really weird, but I'm considering getting rid of my bed and turning the bedroom into a combined dressing area/reading nook, and making the living room futon our official "bed". We sleep on the futon half the time anyway because the TV is in the liv rm, because we smoke in the living room, and other conveniences, but it's crazy cramped with the other liv rm furniture.

If I ditched my double bed, I could reconfigure the BR to have a real sitting area, a nice storage credenda or low shelving, and it would be a QUIET SPACE for reading or etc when one person is in the other room. The thing is, I've always been really emotionally attached to having a BEDROOM, with a nice cozy made-up BED with big pillows and stuff, but could I break that attachment if it made far more sense to?

It would be temporary, just for our stupidly small apartment -- it's not like I'm giving up bedrooms FOR LYFE or anything.

I would also simplify our bedding, like just go the bottom sheet + duvet route instead of the complicated set-up that I'm used to, but has to be re-made every day to look nice -- sheet pulled up and turned down neatly over the comforter, pillows stacked with the shams in the back, blanket folded at the foot, etc. Maybe the more casual throw-duvet and interchangeable pillow covers is more sensible in a house where no one ever makes the bed anyway???

i think this is a GREAT idea - worse case scenario, you hate it, you get another bed or move the futon into the bedroom. esp if your aptmt is small and cramped, it would be totally nice to have a 'nook' kind of thing for chilling and stuff.

its a good time to get rid of your bed anyway, iirc

Oh have I mentioned that I'm like the third owner? You are so right.

The more I think about it, the more I like this. We hate our space and it's going to be winter & really dark in there and I'm afraid we'll get depresso and fight and hate our lives if nothing changes. But when I thought about how we USE the space we have, the bedroom just feels pointless and auxiliary even when we actually sleep in it, and it's not calming, visually, to be in there because of all the wardrobe storage/shelving that looms over you.

It works better as a dressing area, imo, and moving the oversized coffee table & some furniture out of the LR and putting them into a corner of the BR is an added bonus for "being able to walk around" which I'm finding is sadly underrated in our current arrangement.

sounds like a perfect idea, except for the fact that you traditionally enjoy the "idea" of a bedroom (i can ID with this). keep in mind you're not giving up on a bedroom forever, put a painting of a bedroom on the wall in the new dressing space/reading area and enjoy your life. haw!

Hahaha oh I'm already planning how to gussy it up, believe me. I've rearranged my whole apt in my head already and made sketches roughly to-scale of where things will go, what to price at IKEA, dimensions of shelves, etc. If I had an extra $400, I could make a total re-des happen this very weekend.

Idea got KO'ed last night unfortch. Where did that living alone thread go...?

!!

for real?

i'd think it'd be weird to have your bed in the living room, but maybe if you never have guests?

It's an IKEA futon and pulls up into a couch, fyi. But now I'm loath to get rid of my bed because I might need it again sometime. Rearranging is on hold indefinitely, I guess.

Can you do something in the current bedroom to help it be more cosy? Fabric canopy/tent that hides the looming shelves?

We ended up ditching the coffee table in our new space and have gone back to the storage ottomans instead. The coffee table legs come off, so it stores nicely - it hid behind the loveseat, against the wall, when we were in the 700 sq ft loft. The ottomans are narrower (14" vs. 24") and more flexible to arrange, so we get walk-around space.

I was envisioning ottomans in my re-des space too! I remember yours, and I thought they were very smart. But my coffee table is solid teak, Danish-modern, and the size of a small DOOR, so it's impossible to store anywhere and should never go in an apt this size -- but it's what I have, and I'm not getting rid of it for a temporary housing sitch.