Take a Seat

Invite your friends, we’re having a chair party. We now have three.

Stop tweakin’, it’s a fake. I thought it might be real when I saw that shiny chrome glinting from beneath a pile of trash a block away from my apartment. I even pulled it out and turned myself around to bring it back, thereby making me late for work. But upon further inspection and some consultation with the Knoll website, my free Marcel Breuer Cesca chair is a knock-off, I’m roughly 100% sure.

It also has a little problem, in case you couldn’t tell:

I swear, my ass didn’t cause this.

So, given that it’s a knock-off anyway, and the wood has that weird break in the corner joint, and the caning is all sorts of jacked up, and I don’t really need another chair that isn’t part of a glorious dining set (call me old-fashioned, I want those bitches to match), and I’m not even a huge fan of the Breuer chair to begin with, I should probably just put it back where I found it. Right?

But, but, but, but maybe I could just find a place for it. It’s just a chair, after all. And maybe this would be a good risk-free opportunity to try my hand at replacing caning! I watched a youtube video on the topic, and that’s really half the battle. I don’t think it would cost much and it’s a project I could probably complete in front of the TV– always a plus since shit like this convinces me that I’m not wasting time “because I’m working” while taking in the latest episode of Teen Mom or Work of Art (have you seen it? It’s terrible! Therefore, I love it.). So for now it can languish in the corner, lookin’ funky.

Is that the Hoarders theme music I hear? Just in my head? I knew that.

Home(page) Improvements

I didn’t really have the forethought to take pictures or prepare posts before I left for home two weeks ago, which is why the blog has been pretty much dead the last little bit. So while I’ve been twiddling my thumbs, not doing much of anything around my house-house (when do I start calling it “my parent’s house,” grown-ups out there?), and getting a little jittery about all the little projects I’d really like to get done back in New York before school starts, I figured I should get my act together and do something about this blog. So, I bring you three extremely moderate improvements!

1. We now have CATEGORIES.

A note on these: if you click the links at the bottom of the post, it takes you to some bizarre WordPress page where our other posts may or may not show up. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to change this. Therefore, it’s best to use the Categories Cloud in the right side bar (now widened and improved, fyi), which brings you to a list of only our posts. Now you may be thinking “but this site is just about these smartass students’ apartment, isn’t that pretty much one category?” In many ways you’re right. But in some ways you’re wrong. The categories tell you why.

2. Our blogroll got a lil’ chubbier. We’re calling it “husky.”

Some new to the scene, some old, some house-related, some not. It’s a work in progress, but there’s now more material for you to put in your pipe and smoke. And it’s probably going to grow, what with all you swell commenters that have kept me busy on the internet, checkin’ you out. Let’s all start a secret society, k?

3. FLOORPLAN.

In a display of my horrendous computer skills– I know less about them than your great aunt, I guarantee it– I pieced together a to-scale floorplan, posted conveniently in the “Floorplan” tab up at the top of the page. It was done with a misguided mix of Google Sketchup and Photoshop. Fancy. I hope this helps orient you in space if you’re looking at pictures and don’t understand which wall you’re looking at, which is a problem I run into a lot. Not with my house, with other peoples’. Rather than bog it down with a bunch of labeled measurements, I calculated a square footage instead (includes kitchen and bath). My friend Melissa, who’s now been to the apartment, remarked just yesterday, “your apartment’s a lot smaller than the pictures make it look.” So if you were under any illusions, now you know it’s little. Start imagining everything you see in miniature, it ain’t a damn palace.

I’ll be back at the apartment very soon. Get pumped.

Hoarders: Buried Alive

Eva’s moving in soon, but she’s moving most of her stuff in even sooner. Like this weekend soon. Like, tomorrow soon.

In preparation for her arrival, I wanted to clean the place up a bit. You know, swiffer the floors. Some light dusting here and there. Oh yeah, and this:

This was the state of Eva’s room. I know, it legitimately looks like something off one of those many hoarding shows on TV these days. Seriously, there are so many. Kind of like shows about little people. Listen up TLC: Little People, Big Mess. You’re welcome.

Allow me to explain before you click “unsubscribe” on your readers in disgust and curse the day you ever made the mistake of wandering over here. It started off as a good place to put tools and paints and other things that didn’t really have a place. Little by little, other shit just kind of crept in, like extra shelving units left over from the dorms. Buy a new TV and not sure you’re going to keep it? Just put the box in the storage room! Find a dresser on the street with a friend who could really use it for their own apartment in the fall but has nowhere to store it in the meantime? We have space! And on and on. You know how it goes. Well, I do anyway.

In case you’re wondering, when guests came to stay I stuck them in a corner of the living room. My junk needed its space.

Luckily, most of this really was boxes and other things that easily found their new home out in the garbage/recycling. The other stuff got absorbed into the living room, where it’s waiting for a combination of donation, trash, and Craigslist. I’ve never been more stoked for trash night.

But check it! Clean and ready:

Now the organizational challenge that is this small apartment housing two people with one tiny closet really kicks in. Gulp.

Opinion Time!

Stately moldings, wood floors, big windows, nine-foot ceilings, and a variety of pests: some of the splendid features that come standard in New York City pre-war apartments. But those charms tend to come with some trade-offs. It’s hard to tell in the photos, but our floors are conspicuously slanted and none of our windows are quite square. The transom windows above the doors are long gone. Sometimes the exposed pipes get disconcertingly hot. But if loving our apartment demands loving all of our apartment, I suppose we can look past the flaws. Hey, if we ever literally lose our marbles, we’ll know which corner to find them in. Thanks, gravity.

Our lighting is something I both love and hate. When we first saw the apartment, we got ourselves all worked up thinking that the light fixtures in my bedroom and the living room were original, or at least the original electric ones (the building is old enough that the original fixtures might have been gas). Then I went through a phase of thinking they were some kind of bad 70s replicas. Now I really don’t know. More than one person has walked into the apartment and immediately asked “are you going to change out the lights?” But fuck the haters, I think they’re interesting. In any case, I’m not sure what to do with them.

When I first moved in, they looked like this. I’m all about sustainability, but I just refuse to accept those exposed CFL bulbs, and the frosted incandescents are just wrong. I know, I’m all sorts of evil, single-handedly causing global warming, but they’re ugly. I’ll use them in the lamps.

So that’s the first challenge, the bulbs. Ideally, I’d have fancy moody bulbs like this:

But I don’t live in a swanky restaurant or a haunted mansion, nor am I about to spend a small fortune on lightbulbs. So in an effort to add a mod spin on the old fixtures, I replaced all of the bulbs with clear round incandescents. A big improvement, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re not right either.

Also, the flaky gold paint just isn’t my style. I was the first person to actually take down the lights before painting the ceilings in a long time, so the edges are also adorned in various shades of white-ish paint.

Requisite fire escape shot

So I took the one in my bedroom down, gave it some attention with a wire bush, and spray-painted it the same Rustoleum matte black as the door hardware, figuring it’ll be super-duper easy to just take them down and repaint them gold when we move.

I don’t even dislike the black, but I still feel like I’m missing something here. I’m not constitutionally against silver spray paint, but I have a feeling it would look tacky in this application. High-gloss black seems sort of dramatic glitzy-glam, for lack of a better explanation. Sometimes I think white is the answer, but that just doesn’t seem right either. Or am I crazy and the black-paint-clear-round-bulb-combo is a winner? Consequently, I’ve been holding off on doing the living room light until I have some sort of epiphany, but I’m losing faith that it’ll happen. That, and I can’t put it back without a second set of hands (coming soon!).

The suggestion box is open, don’t be shy.

Tools of the Trade

Part of clearing out my shame from Eva’s room last week involved facing a harsh reality. I’m not nearly organized enough. When space is at such a premium, however, something has to be done about that.

The tools, in particular, were in crisis. Check out the hardware drawer in my Ikea Pax Wardrobe. Shudder.

And to add insult to injury, here’s what Eva’s room vomited out, most of which also needed to fit.

One thing about the 39″ wide PAX wardrobe is that those drawers are HUGE, which makes them exceptionally hard to organize on their own. So off to the Container Store I went, naturally.

After a bout of sorting and organizing, here it sits. The containers are just those basic Container Store brand plastic boxes (the big ones are shoe boxes and the small ones are accessory boxes). The tops are fussy, so I don’t use them. I love these containers– well made enough, only $1.79 each, and offered in tons of different sizes to quell your psychopathic demands for uniformity in your organization.

In case you noticed a big something missing, the drill found its way into a shelf where it takes up less space.

Big manly drill... next to the sewing machine. Foiled again!

I promise I’ll stop showing off my messes soon. Because there won’t be any, of course.