New and Improved Living Room

I did my quarterly furniture rearranging last night. Yes, I did it. By myself. Well, mostly. I emptied out the secretary in the living room.


I took all the dishes out and then my husband and a houseguest moved it into the dining room for me. When the started I asked them, "Would you like to use the furniture dolly?" and a person who shall remain nameless in the interest of marital harmony said, "No," and it was about two seconds letter they started talking about glue and clamps and how it probably wouldn't tip over before tomorrow when our houseguest will repair the broken leg.

Then everybody else went upstairs to watch the first episode of the Lord of the Rings, extended edition, or off to take pictures, or talk on the phone, or listen to an HP book on CD. I stayed in the living room and did yoga rearranged things.

I moved one loveseat about three different places before I settled on a location. I put about five different things in another spot before I settled on something I liked, and then it was the first thing I had tried in that spot.

Basically, there were 9 pieces of furniture upon which one might sit in our living room. Plus one wheeled hassock. Now there are ten pieces of furniture upon which one might sit, plus two wheeled hassocks, and only the big couch is where it was when I started. Besides the piano bench. I haven't moved the piano since friends helped bring it in and set it where it is now.

The Cherub helped, if by help we mean she kept trying to sit down in the very piece of furniture I was moving, whichever piece that was.

The new arrangement works, although one chair probably will have to go upstairs even though another chair is lonely and needs a friend. The chair that's going upstairs isn't really the right friend for the chair that's staying down. They just aren't right for each other and will have to find true love elsewhere. I *think* there is a chair upstairs that will actually work, but moving chairs up and down the stairs is more than I can do.

I like the living room right now, but I probably won't next week. It's an awkward shape, an awkward size, and the rooms coming off of it are at awkward spaces.

Formerly it looked to me as though somebody put the couch, loveseats, benches, and chairs in a box, shook them up like dice and then tossed them out into my living room willy-nilly. Partly it looks like that because several times a month we have so many people in the living room that in order to fit, we just push everything back against the walls and doorways, so it may not stay this way, but Right Now there is order and arrangement- there are conversational groupings where two or three people can sit and talk quietly or play a game. It looks as though somebody put the furniture where it is by design instead of by a shake of the dice.

It also looks something like a hotel lobby. An old fashioned, private hotel where people live, and it's the hodgepodge hotel lobby of a dodgy sort of hotel, furnished by bits and pieces willed to the hotel owner by previous hotel residents, including the cat lady, you know, the old woman with thirty cats, strange shawls and shoes that don't match, and the reclusive old man who sidles into the hotel like a crab and never looks anybody in the eye, and the aging Hollywood starlet who drinks her breakfast from a champagne glass and has purple hair.


I have also rearranged the sun-room this week. I have an idea for a kind of a poor man's window seat that will work if the dry-cleaner does things like loveseat cushions, and if I can get a piece of furniture over here from the Rattery. The floor in the sun-room needs thorough sweeping and mopping and then it should be varnished. I really want some more plants in there now- but I am not sure what . I don't have much of a green thumb, but I am a little tired of the monotony of geraniums and spiderplants. I have a couple other things, but I want more. Greedy, malcontented brat that I am. But there are bare spaces now, and I need (need?) some other houseplants to balance some spaces out.

It occurs to me that I should probably take pictures of each incarnation of my living room to compare to previous versions.

Incidentally, my family mostly scoffs at my rearranging. It's a family joke, but I think the joke may be on them. Last night the boy came downstairs, looked around, and said in a slightly bored and very condescending tone, "So you've been rearranging again, I see." Then he looked at one corner where two benches are set in an L pattern and said, "That doesn't really work well, but if you pulled the large bench out more, then you could fit a small table between them and that would be cool."

He's quite right, too. Don't tell him now, but I think he's caught the bug.