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One of the things I have been doing with myself in the last three months is watching videos in an online interior design course, mostly because various things about the house bother me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's not mean to be a pro-level course, and there's various things I already know, but it's helped me figure out one room so far, by forcing me to slow down and first think about who uses the room, what for and how it's used.

It's the laundry room. One would think, "Laundry, duh." But it's also circulation space, because it connects the house to the garage which is the door we use 99% of the time, and it's also storage space. And I would like it to be hang-dry space as well, because the other options for hanging clothes to dry are untenable for various reasons:

1) the first and foremost is my ADHD. The more steps I have to do, the less likely it is to get done. Get out the drying rack, take it somewhere in the house or back porch, set it up, hang clothes, check if they're dry, collect them, bring them in, break down the drying rack, and put it back where it's stored? OH HELL NO.

2) drying outside also makes the clothes smell like the outside and I've never had problems with this before, but both

myrialux and I concur that the outdoors smell we get on clothes here is not appealing. Plus, we live in POLLEN CENTRAL and would like to not be allergic to our clothes.

3) the best place to dry inside is the spare room/gym and if clothes are hanging there that I need to move before working out, I won't work out (ADHD again). The spare bath is taken up by the litterbox, and the main bath is back to issue #1, with the added problem of fitting the drying rack in the tub. Any other room gets HUMID and GROSS.

So! I have a PLAN for the laundry room, once we get the $$$ saved up. Steps:

1) hire our neighborhood appliance handyman company to stack the washer and dryer on one side of the TINY room and swap the dryer door to open on the same side as the washer.

2) measure the back wall, to allow for power and water outlets and the dryer vent in the next step, which is...

3) install simple shelving of the rails-screwed-into-studs with shelves on them type, adroitly avoiding the outlets and vents above, as well as pegboard on part of it, to allow for...

4) the wall-mounted drying racks that will require a bit of space to extend/fold out. And then finally...

5) a closet rod installed across the room for clothing that can be put on hangers and hung.

SIMPLY RENDERED PEECTURES BELOW THE CUT...
( you know you want to know more about my laundry room )

It occurred to me, while I was in the throes of a major hunger-induced ADHD Moment at 10:45 wherein I was trying to, at the same time, (a) figure out what to eat, (b) buy curtains for the bedroom, (c) figure out where to get a paint chip of the wall color for the bedroom, and (d) decide if it was worth waiting 15 minutes to just eat lunch instead, that I now work from home and if I was done with the immediate workload, I could just...take the afternoon off and go buy curtains. MIND. BLOWN.

So things got sorted out.

myrialux pulled the paint can in question out of the garage and dipped a popsicle stick in it to make a paint chip for me (it's 10 years old; I'd be surprised if Home Despot had that particular color of chip), then after I offered to go pick up lunch looked at me and decided I shouldn't be driving in that state so we went out to Raising Cane's and ate an early lunch in the car while listening to the current audiobook (Garth Nix's Sabriel, read by Tim Curry), and reassured me that yes, I could just go out and buy curtains. So once a few more tweaks on this cover are approved by the author.. it's curtains for me!

Re: the curtains--I have hated the way our main bedroom is set up ever since we moved into this house, and never managed to figure out how to arrange it, so I ended up finding an interior designer on Fiverr, sent them the measurements, some photos, and the constraints* I had, and she sent me back a set of 4 renders that make the room look CALM and RELAXING and NOT LIKE A COLLEGE DORM so I am over the moon with it and now have something to more-or-less aim for in arrangement, decor, etc.

*The biggest constraint was our sound-dampening curtains, which need to stay because of the very busy road behind our house that occasionally hosts illegal drag racing at night, but I said I was fine with covering them up with other curtains. Second biggest constraint was the couch, which is mostly being stored in this bedroom until we move on the off chance that we have a place for it in whatever new house we move into. Yes, I know, not really the best thing but I don't want to sell it or toss it, and it will provide a nice place to sit and read, provided we stop piling random stuff on top of it (hah).

edit: Also, rhythmic gymnastics with your dog is a thing, and you should watch this YouTube video of a woman and her border collie (I think?) competing. Energetic part starts about 2 minutes in.

Cat story and photo of new library/dining room arrangement.

( cut for temporary cat illness--she's fine now--and cat photos )

And that last pic leads us into the new library/dining room/gaming room! We were both too keyed up to work yesterday, so took the day off and kept our hands busy finishing it off. Only one photo, because I didn't think to take more, but you get the effect.

( cut for pic and talk about interior design )

We got a massive urge to rearrange the house and spent the better part of all 3 days of the holiday weekend doing so. Far from done, mostly because a lot of it involves culling books and other shelved possessions, then unloading books and possessions, then unscrewing bookcase braces from the walls, then doing the 3D equivalent of those sliding puzzles to get the pathway and destination cleared enough to slide heavy furniture there, then measure out the placement and screw the braces back onto the walls--the cats probably can't tip stuff over but we have a small active nephew--then load them back up.

Why measuring placement? I used Photoshop to make scaled floorplans and arrange scaled furniture virtually. Quicker overall than putting all the cases in and manually arranging them to fit, and it means we don't have to unload all the cases at once--we can unload the one going in the middle, place and secure and reload it, then just put the others next to it.

The advantage of having done strength training for a year was clear: stacks of books that I'd normally have found too heavy were much less heavy. I was limited in the amount I could carry by how many I could hold at one time, not by how heavy they were. That was during the culling-and-moving-out-of-the-way phase. We did eventually get down empty boxes and fill them for the move-to-the-destination-room phase, and the filled boxes were still too heavy for me to carry very far, but we also own a small hand truck. (Which did start showing signs of age, so when we did a hardware store run for flat-plug extension cords to go behind the bookcases, we also picked up a newer, sturdier hand truck.)

I'll post more when we've got the whole process completed. It'll be a bit. :D

Crossposts: http://telophase.livejournal.com/2497112.html

We rearranged the master bedroom this weekend. The way the house is set up, the master opens off of a very short hall that's right off the living room, and the way it was set up before, you could see the bed from the living room so it didn't feel very private, especially when we had friends over. By moving the bed over to the far wall, the sight line is now blocked and it feels nicer.

There was also the problem of all the exercise equipment. Experts on sleep claim you shouldn't,t have that sort of thing in the bedroom, but experts can go jump off a cliff because there isn't anywhere else to put it.

So here it is, in all it's COMPLETELY BLANK-WALLED GLORY. No pictures up on the walls at the moment. We used to have one nice wide one up on the wall the headboard is now against, but took it down because it was HEAVY and we were terrified it would fall down on our heads and do severe damage one night. It'll be put up on the opposite wall eventually.

( cut for pics )

So there it is, beginning to take shape after 2 years. We've got to grab our collection of artworks that don't yet have a home and work out what should go on the wall and in what arrangement. Not an award-winning room, but it'll do!

Crossposts: http://telophase.livejournal.com/2429348.html

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that we'd gone to IKEA and the Container Store and PURCHASED ALL THE THINGS because we'd finally gotten our washer and dryer stacked and could finally get our laundry room organized.

We added the final touch tonight, so now I have pictures!

( Cut for pictures, including LITTERBOXES with NO cat poop )

Crossposts: http://telophase.livejournal.com/2227350.html

Here's my new office setup.

( cut for pictures )

Crossposts: http://telophase.livejournal.com/1833041.html

So I just got moved into my new office. Woo! It's got a window, but the window looks out on the stacks and encourages people to stop and watch me, so the blinds on it are staying shut. (The door has a window also, but I have a 24 x 36" "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster on order, which I will use to cover it.)

When looking for (relatively) inexpensive ways to put very large things on the wall that fake being windows, I ran across a wall mural site that sold some mid-size murals and this one struck me. There was a much larger one that struck me as well, but alas I have come to the conclusion that I cannot get it onto the walls without cutting some major holes in it for things like the emergency light/siren thingy hanging in my office. Alas.

At any rate, the mural above is not only just 4'2" tall (and comes in 4 panels), which will fit on my walls and look like a large window, but it is 12 foot wide *and* is composed in such a way that I can use two panels of it for one window and two panels of it for another window on the other side of the office, and it won't be obviously chopped in half. Like so:

( Read more... )

So ... the crux of the matter is: I need to turn these wallpaper-type panels into something that can be hung on the wall. So they need to be stuck to a backing. Foam board, the obvious thing, doesn't come cheaply in sizes of the panels (3' x 4'2"). I can duct-tape foam board together, but need to come up with a way to strengthen it so it doesn't fold in half while transporting AND come up with a way for it to be hung on a wall. (I can hang anything I want on the wall as long as I get the physical plant to come do it, because that way they have to pay for wall damages instead of the library if they screw up. Plus, they're good at it.)

Putting some sort of molding on it so that it looks like a window would be good - any suggestions for that? And how to fix said molding on?

We stopped by the house last night to take measurements of all the rooms so we can start working out where things should go.

( cut for maundering on about furniture arrangement )

...Yeah, lotsa posts right now, but I just dumped 275 photos from my camera onto my hard drive and have a Thing against mixing subjects in one post.

( New furniture! )

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Entries tagged with interior design

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Master bedroom

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