department of the interior: home decor

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.

i had a dream about laurel's bedroom/living room conundrum lol

I advocate keeping furniture if at all possible - I've almost always regretted it, any time I've gotten rid of a piece due to space. Even when I say "we are never moving again"... well, it's always in the back of my head that we might.

Ha! What did you dream? Did it all work out?

i dreamed that i was trying to solve the problem in person

did any of the furniture fly around or was self-propelled in any way?

no, but the BF was not agreeable to anything i came up with

Laurel was wearing a black pencil skirt and ballet top

Even when I say "we are never moving again"... well, it's always in the back of my head that we might.

You are delusional -- I was JUST THINKING late last week about your obsession with moving!!! You! You have had more dream kitchens that anyone! And you keep leaving them! I had JUST accepted it was a charming eccentricity, as long as you and R were on the same wavelength etc but MAN if I had your library (and that loft!!) I would never move again. Possibly I would never even LEAVE the unit, much less move out of it.

lolololol roxy! He's not agreeable to anything I come up with either, so it's nothing personal.

I know, it's crazy. I think we might have stayed in the loft if things hadn't gotten very weird with the landlord/owner in May. Also if the new people who moved in above us hadn't been so loud in the wee hours. etc. The new place and the new neighborhood are both completely charming, and having a landlord who is also a friend (and cares about this house) and neighbors whom we know has been a revelation and may have grounded out my transient drive. I can envision staying here a long time - and the kitchen is great :)

i have two ikea half-height bookshelves that are extremely useful and also extremely ugly: so i am thinking about covering them in wallpaper. anyone done this before?

Sounds like a disaster, tbh. All those corners are NEVER going to fold or lie flat.

What about painting it, instead? You could put the wallpaper on something nice and flat, like the backing board, so you just see the print at the backs of the shelves?

:/

i saw a blog post about it and got all excited - but you're probably right. it's that chipboard/veneer kind of bookshelf, so do i just give it a bit of a rough sanding and then paint directly onto it?

I thought about wallpaper+varnishing my Billys a while back but never got round to it. It does look ace when it's done properly (I don't know how often it fails miserably though, as I guess those people don't blog about it).

Chipboard, eh? You could slap some spackle on them, maybe? Or some other kind of filler, just to smooth things out some before the paint goes on?

you can cover them tightly with thin fabric so that they look wallpapered like so

http://www.housetohome.co.uk/imageBank/o/opener1.jpg

what about contact paper?

ooh yeah that thin fabric look is nice, too!

Could be difficult to clean though?

Yeah, you'd have to unpin and launder and iron/starch it. Or you could vacuum it occasionally if you have a little vac, I guess. But I worry about that black city schmutz that gets on everything in NY, perhaps you don't have this problem where you are!

J, I finally understand what you mean by "chipboard and veneer"! I don't know why that seemed so impenetrable to me yesterday.... Something like this? Which is particle board, btw:

http://gospelfodder.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/particle-board.jpg

I still don't think wallpapering it is the answer, but I'm not sure what IS. That stuff is hard to disguise.

yeah particle board is the right word, couldn't think of it! i have two these ugly beasts, maybe i'll try painting one first.

Amazing Post on Home Interior Blog
http://styleonartfactory.com/blog/

thanks

are vintage wall murals acceptable? or are they nothing but kitschy nostalgia? don't feel like i've seen these around since they were originally in fashion, but i'd guess that maybe they're hard to come by. perhaps i'm wrong. i'd kinda like one in my kitchen anyway, but my gf is completely not buying the idea.

this dude has a bunch:
http://ewmoore.co.uk/wallposters_pg1.htm

particularly want to eat cereal in front of this one:
http://ewmoore.co.uk/images/C211.jpg

those are hideous!

i dunno they're kind of amazing in a way

amazingly hideous?

the alpine one rules! you'll come around, son

it's only the mountain one that i'd consider.

the rest are pretty hideous, it's true. would have to that seventies national geographic photography style. alpine or forest. nothing tropical or cityscapes.

haha, why?

http://ewmoore.co.uk/images/C860.jpg

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/1868/c860.jpg

We've had this debate before...she wants to hang an oversaturated tropical sunset, I want to hang some tasteful B+W landscape photography. Still unresolved, to nobody's satisfaction.