09.10.09

This one has been a long time coming…

Posted in Reno saga at 9:43 pm by jeci

The spare bedroom (seen here and here in varying states of spirit-killing squalor). But let’s go back to the beginning, just for full effect.

Before

As you can see, again with the beige (BEIGE). Grubby, depressing beige. Beige wallpaper, beige carpet, beige curtains. BEIGE. There is a certain efficiency to using the same non-colour for every surface of your home, BUT STILL. I’ve been over the nightmare that was that fracking wallpaper, so there’s not much fun to be had by way of a during picture, except perhaps to review this…this…STATE OF AFFAIRS THAT CAN ONLY BE SPOKEN OF IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE MY GOD IT WAS HORRIBLE LIVING LIKE THAT BUT ANYWAY HERE YOU GO, I’LL STOP YELLING NOW.

During, My God, the During

And now, several months of manual labour and an untold number of boxes later, here we are!

After

What you’re looking at: walls that have been de-wallpapered, patched, and painted “Zen Green,” which doesn’t actually photograph all that well, but it’s a really pretty, soft, airy green; new flooring that, of course, matches the flooring in the rest of the house; new floaty curtains; new baseboards; our old skool TV atop our antique sideboard that has been waiting to be refinished for the last year but is just going to have to wait even longer because, you know, RENOS; and our new (to us) futon that we got off of Freecycle because we had grown quite weary of spending money on the new home and, also, free! The room in general is a little…unfinished yet, in terms of giving it any real personality or flare, but we’re getting there.

Now, about that futon. I was wary of the free futon from strangers over the Internet. I felt quite certain that cat pee would be involved. However, like I said, spending money on the new home had worn rather thin at that point, and moreover, we’d resolved that all of the renovations would be paid for in cash and buying a new piece of furniture would have been stretching our limits in that regard. So we were willing to give the free futon a shot, figuring that at least we could get a free frame and buy a new, non-urine soaked mattress if necessary. But instead of getting a musty mattress saturated with pee (or wandering into an axe-murderer’s trap, which was my other fear), we hit the freecycle jackpot and found ourselves in one of the most immaculate homes I’ve ever seen, picking up a perfectly good, stain and odour-free futon. For free. The only downside to the whole transaction was that the mattress cover was rather ugly. So, I dug our old duvet cover out of the Goodwill bag and lo! It suited the paint in the spare room quite nicely! Only. Erm, by quite nicely I mean “matched exactly.” As in, “Where’s the futon? I see two floating arm rests and then a sea of Zen Green…” And so commenced my city-wide search for some throw pillows to jazz up the room a bit and, also, to outline the location of the futon so that unwary visitors wouldn’t go bashing their shins into our cleverly camouflaged furniture. And you’ll never guess what colour of cushion is widely available everywhere, from Ikea to Urban Barn and every big box and little store in between. ZEN GREEN. Zen green cushions in every shape and size imaginable! (And don’t even get me started on what it took to come full circle to those white curtains that are exactly the same as the ones in the master bedroom because do you want to know what is very popular right now for curtains? Yes. Of course. ZEN GREEN.) (But I rather love the look of those white curtains now, so it’s all for the best.)

Some other notes on this room: I’d wanted it to feel light and airy and with the colour, the natural light, and the sheer curtains it really does. The room is perfect for sitting and reading, which I love. I also love the whole idea of having another room. We lived in one bedroom apartments for years; this tiny room has become this lovely little sanctuary and the airy feel adds to that. We don’t have to be in the living room or the bedroom…or the living room…or the bedroom. We can, if we want, have a space to ourselves. It’s…a revelation.

We also wanted to try having the TV separate from the main living area so that the focus of the living room could be more on creating a “conversation circle” with the furniture, instead of just pointing all the furniture at the TV. This has worked out quite nicely on the whole. However, the spare bedroom is small and turned out to be rather narrower than we initially thought (I think it’s really designed to be either an office or a nursery) and as you can see, our TV is rather big. So when we do watch TV or movies, we’re uncomfortably close to the screen and we end feeling a little sea sick and cross-eyed. This situation would likely be rectified by a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, but given how very little TV we watch, it just isn’t worth spending the money at this point. I feel obliged to explain that, by the way, because a surprising number of people are resistant to our hesitation to rush out an buy a new TV to the point where I find myself apologizing for how we’re not spending money on a luxury item we don’t need or use. People are weird about it is all I’m saying.

Boy, being frugal can take the wind out of the design-revelation sails, can’t it? “Ta-da! A room with a discarded futon with an old duvet cover that had been headed to charity…all of it facing another second-hand piece of furniture and a hand-me-down TV that is generally considered a mockery to middle class living! Oprah? Are you calling Nate?”

Anyway, I’d also wanted the spare bedroom to serve as an office/space where I can write, which it may well do yet, with a little rearranging of the furniture to accommodate a desk. Although it would have to be creative rearranging once a new piece of furniture was added, wouldn’t it? It’s a small, small space…albeit a small, small space that’s somehow added a whole new dimension to our living space in general. If it came down to it, I’d give up the en suite bathroom (as handy as it is) in a heart beat before I’d give up having a second bedroom.

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