Bed Nook

“Are you getting divorced?”  The store clerk asked nonchalantly as if asking how I liked the town or something.  I was at Big Lots, buying my new bed.  Buying a twin bed because it’s all that will fit.

The nook off the main room at my new place, now dubbed “the bed nook,” is exactly the size of a twin bed.  As soon as I realized that, I knew it’d be perfect.  It looked like the previous tenant had used it as an off-shoot of the kitchen.  There was a large shelf with a microwave and an interchangeable basket shelving unit like Munchkinhead has in Cudahy attached to the wall.  I relocated both.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I painted the walls in the nook blue and repainted the ceiling above it with a fresh coat of flat white.  I also gave the alcove near the window a fresh coat of white.  I made sure to put anything I’d want in that storage unit in it before setting up my bed.  And I made sure that would be stuff I wouldn’t want to get to unless I were moving again, because once that bed’s up, I’m not getting into the storage unit.  Luckily, the water meter is viewable from the hole in the side of the alcove.

I use the alcove basically as a nightstand.  In the alcove, I placed a holder of some sort that I picked up at my aunt’s house.  I think it’s for mail or something, but I use it to hold my books so they won’t fall through the cut-out in the wall down into the storage unit.  I also placed my alarm clock on the alcove shelf with a power strip so I can plug my phones in at night. 

The outlet is in the middle of the wall, which is nice.  It’s easily accessible even with the bed in place.  The nook has it’s own overhead light with switch.  (The rest of the apartment, aside from the bathroom, is on a single switch.)  And that switch is in the nook itself but still reachable from the main room.  Perfect.

To help separate the bed nook from the main room, I decided to hang curtains around the foot of it.  I considered a number of different fabrics, including heavy light-blocking curtains, but in the end decided to go with a light beige mesh.  The mesh allows light to flow into the main room from the alcove window, but still separates the nook and the room.  The beige goes well with the main room color scheme and the mesh has sort of a mosquito net feel that works with with the African decor in the main room.  The net is hung from buttonholes in the top of the fabric on a number of  brass cup hooks screwed into the ceiling.

The bed nook is super cozy and a great place for sleeping, especially with the down comforter and four quilts on my bed.  It’s a nice, quiet area away from any work spaces in my home, reserved solely for rest and sleep.  Having a window right nearby is very nice and I am excited for the breezes this will provide in summer.  I love crawling into my bed at night and hate crawling out of it in the morning.  A perfect score in the test of a good bed.

(And for those of you who were wondering: yes, it’s on risers and yes, I have to practically jump to get on it.  The top of the bed is 39” from the floor.)

Making Room for Clothes part 2

Even with my fabulous new double-decker closet pole, that closet can not hold all my clothes.  I generally have kept most of my clothes on hangers, pretty much everything other than undergarments and socks.  Circumstances were dictating a change.

The apartment came with a neat little white bureau of some sort.  It has a large cabinet with two shelves, a smaller cabinet with two shelves and two small drawers.  I also got a white dresser from my aunt’s house.  Between these two items of furniture, I was able to tuck away most of the clothes that people traditionally fold: t-shirts, trousers, handkerchiefs, sweaters, etc.

But what to do with all my dresses and skirts that didn’t fit in the closet and big bulky things like hoodies?  Poles to the rescue!  Poles installed by a partial-Pole. Hee hee.

After making the hanging pole in the closet, I had a length of metal closet pole left over.  I trimmed it down to the appropriate size and installed it next to the fridge.  I’d originally had a tension shower rod running through that space, from under the overhang, but that kept falling under the weight of my jackets.  A mounted closet pole is much sturdier and works great to hold all my hoodies, my shawls, my scarves and my extra winter jackets, including my high school letter jacket.

Original attempt with the shower tension rod.

Mounted closet pole

That shower tension rod went to good use elsewhere, with two other shower tension rods.  The three of them are hung together as a cluster across the narrow part of my Dressing/office/sitting room.  They essentially split off the dressing part of the room from the office/sitting part. 

At first, I just had two rods.  That didn’t work so well; gravity and all.  With three hung all three together they balance out the load by sharing the weight.  One has cardigans, one has dresses, one has skirts and empty hangers from whatever’s in the wash.  Since redistributing the weight that way, they haven't’ fallen.

Quick, knock on some wood.

Making Room for the Clothes part 1

My new place has one closet.  One not-so-very-big but oh-so-very-tall closet.  The ceilings in the apartment are only about 7feet, but for some reason, the bar in this closet is still higher than most, almost near the top of the closet.  “This is awesome!”  I thought to myself, “so much potential.”

First, the tall bar means I can hang up my long dresses and my catsuit without them dragging on the floor.   That’s excellent.  It also means there’s room for a double-decker bar.  So, I built one.

I went to that fabulous hardware store and picked up a metal clothes pole, two eye bolts, two S hooks and two pieces of 6-ft lengths of chain.

I wanted the double-decker pole to only be half the closet so that I still had a place to hang my long dresses.  I measured that space in the closet and cut the metal pole to size with my hacksaw.  I’m not very good at cutting straight with a hacksaw, especially when I’m using my legs as a clamp to hold what I’m cutting.   The edge is a bit crooked, but not too bad.  I used the wire brush attachment on my Dremel to remove burs and smooth out the cut edge of the pole.

Then I drilled my holes.  Well, I tried to drill my holes.  I had a 1/16” drill bit the hardware store gave me for free that was strong enough to go through metal.  But my eye bolts were 1/4” and the only bits I had big enough for that were masonry and dry wall bits.  Neither would go through metal.  I had to put the project aside for a week while I gallivanted all over the country and come back to it when I had the proper bit.  I picked up the proper bit in Milwaukee.

Once I had the holes drilled, I put the eye bolts in and screwed on the nuts.  I put holes in both sides of the bar so that the eye bolts go all the way through, making the bar studier when it’s on the chains.  I put one end of each piece of chain on empty hangers and hung the hangers on the closet’s existing pole.  I put an S hook on the other ends and the other side of the S hooks on the eye bolts.  And there I had it, a second level in my closet!

I have it arranged now so that my long dresses are in the single-decker area, my suits are on the top level of the double-decker area and my blouses are on the hanging bar.  It’s working great so far.

New Home

Somehow, I manage to keep moving into smaller and smaller places.  El Cerrito smaller than Nashville, Cudahy smaller than El Cerrito, and DC smaller than all. But it is going to be so cute!

It’s a one-bedroom spot euphemistically called an “English Garden apartment.”  It’s the basement.  It has it’s own entrance out back to the “garden.”  There’s a main room and the other room that’s called a bedroom, and a bathroom, and a hallway, and a nook, and the house’s laundry room and furnace room, and some under-the-stairs storage.

I’ve adjusted things a bit.  The nook is now my bed nook.  It has a window and a very large alcove above a storage area that houses the water meter.  It’s holding the things that would normally be on my nightstand: alarm clock, phone chargers, reading books, journals, etc.   The “bedroom” is now my dressing/sitting/office room.  The main room is combination kitchen and living room, also makes julienne fries, it will not break, it…. sorry.  Too much Aladdin.

It is mostly below ground in front and in back, so the windows are small and there’s an air conditioner in one.  But I’ve found that opening the curtains and the back door lets in a fair amount of light.  The below-ground bit also means there’s stairs to go up when you go out.  They’re under a cement porch.  Duck!  There’s a good chunk of cement missing from all the people who have hit their heads.

It’s going to be a lot of work to get the place set up.  I’m hoping by March.  But I’m already in love with what it’s going to be.  The first thing I did was move the refrigerator out of the main room.  It was taking up almost a quarter of the room.   There’s a very large area at the bottom of the stairs.  I measured the opening between the stairs and the wall, at the molding, and it was just big enough to get the fridge through with some finessing.

Fridge’s new home.  (Above, moving fridge through the gap.)

Then I painted.  It was amazing what a fresh coat of gloss white on the painted woodwork did to the place!  It suddenly seemed bigger and brighter and no longer dingy.  The walls in the place were peach, pretty much the same peach as our old Africa Room in Cudahy.  I painted the bed nook the blue that my bedroom in Cudahy was.  In the dressing/sitting/office room, I painted one accent wall the green that Munchkinhead and I had put in the hallway in Cudahy.  In the main room, the back wall of the room is actually the hallway wall; that side is open except for a pillar.  I painted that wall a dark brownish red that I got at the fabulous newly opened hardware store I found in town.  I was their first paint mix!  It’s going to go very well with my African decor.  I gave the rest of the main room walls a fresh coat of peach.  I also touched up the ceilings.

Main room accent wall

A Dear John Letter to Milwaukee

Dear Milwaukee,

You know I love you.  I do.  Your frozen custard, your seasons, your traffic-free streets and super cheap parking, the way I can get anywhere in twenty minutes, how wonderful it is to see family so frequently.  But, it’s time to go, time for us to part ways again. You make me so very happy, but I want more from life than contentment.  I want adventure.  I have more to give than you can let me offer.

So I’m off, onto something new and big and scary and exciting.

Let others love you as I have, as I do.  Love them back.  And when we meet again, I hope it can be happiness enough to share another moment in time.

Love,
me

 

 

 

Backdated to leaving

Pse Tlyde Pte and Other Funny Prefixes

The other day I was helping my new roommate, The Legend, move.  Well, I was trying to help.  However, The Legend is a guy, and being such, he had absolutely nothing packed, practically refused to use boxes, and when he did agree to use a box obstinately insisted that it was assembled correctly and was supposed to have wings.  (Really, it isn’t this difficult. plhhh, men.)

So basically, my helping consisted mostly of driving the car.  And waiting.  Waiting for him to scoop whatever mass of fibers, metal and who-knows-what off his floor and into giant bags.  While waiting, I discovered two wonderful things.  The first was the remote to his mother’s television.  This remote was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen.  It was HUGE!  Practically as big as the tv screen itself.  It was so big, I assumed it was a toy and was quite surprised when my pushing the power button caused the television to turn on.

There was my second wonderful discovery, a PBS show called Dinosaur Train.  It’s a bout a family of Pteranodons, or something else I probably can’t pronounce, and their adopted T-Rex that hatched in their nest.  The family goes on different adventures on the Dinosaur Train, which allows them to time travel, too.  In this particular episode one of the young Pteranodons, Tiny, was upset because he lost his special place as the littlest to a microraptor the family visited via the Dinosaur Train.  I could sympathize with Tiny.  He felt about the little microrapter just like I did on Sunday about Mr. Trizzle and the Legend when they took away my job of organizing the packing in the moving truck.  We all need our special roles.  In the end, the littel microrapter and Tiny worked together to save the day.  (And Mr. Trizzle, the Legend and I worked together to pack the truck up nice.)  Oh, and I learned that “micro” means “small.” ;)

I really liked the show.  I kept wondering if Alfred would like it, too, since it’s about dinosaurs; or whether it would upset her because she’d be pointing out all the things wrong with it.  “A T-Rex egg wouldn’t just show up in a Pteranodon nest!” she’d say.  But the show made the Pteranodons travel through time on the Dinosaur Train in order to visit the microraptors (since the microraptors have wings and feathers, I’m assuming they are from a later time period), so Alfred should be pleased about that.  I got the show for my Zune, so maybe we can watch it together after Christmas.

The Two Hearts

Moving, moving, moving.  She felt like she was always moving.  She was tired of it, and tired of dragging around so much stuff with her.  Kneeling down on the hard floor she groped around under the bed until she felt what she was looking for.  Hidden deep in that dark abyss, behind empty boxes, a missing shoe and a few stray pieces of paper.  She pulled the heavy black bag, tugging as it caught on the underside of the bed.  It was a little overstuffed, but she’d never been willing to expand beyond one bag.

These were her ‘mementos,’ discarded remnants of relationships long past.  No use in keeping them anymore.  She wasn’t moving all the way across the country to hold onto this baggage, physically or emotionally.  She probably should have just thrown the whole bag into the trash, but the sentimental never let go that easily.

Making herself as comfortable as the wood floor would allow, she sat down next to the large box that had become the garbage, already full of the crazy odds and ends one finds when packing up their life.  And in the mist of all the other packing, she began to unpack.  Unpack the bag and unpack the corners of her memory, corners she had purposely allowed the cobwebs to cover.

A hair brush from a guy she sort of dated in college, a t-shirt from some frat boy, a framed sketch, all sorts of random things that have use only as sentimental objects.  The trash, the pile for Good-Will, the recycling bin, the different items were distributed as appropriate.  Lingerie that was never worn, birthday cards, printouts of long im conversations.  Some of it seemed downright ridiculous to still be in her possession.

Then she pulled out a small ball of tissue paper.  Confusion crossed her face.  What could this be?  She began to unwrap it.  Sharp edges protruded from the tissue, yet there was a solid circular feel to it.  She knew exactly what it was.

Her 17th birthday.  Her boyfriend, her first boyfriend, had given it to her as a present.  A small clear crystal heart, the tip perched on this circular base with swirls of clear crystal and a pink rose, two birds had sat together on one of the heart’s round humps.  She remembered unwrapping it, sitting in the passenger seat of the car in a parking lot.  She remembered wishing it was her 16th instead of her 17th birthday because then it would somehow be more special.  And she remembered what happened to that gift.

It was a little thing at first, a crack, or maybe one of the birds fell off.  Some sort of damage to the structural integrity of the gift.  That week, they got in a fight.  Then, things were getting better, they were patching it up, they were working on it and moving forward.  At least she thought so.  Until she was trying to adjust something on the bed and knocked the gift off her night stand.  In broke into many, many pieces.  The next week, the relationship ended.  For good.  He moved.  She went on.

Many months later, she came across the broken pieces of the gift, which she had gathered together and kept in her desk drawer.  It really was such a pretty present.  Why not try to put it back together again?  She took a small tube of super glue and attached the first piece back onto the circular base.  The next day, she ran into his best friend.

She glued on a few more pieces.  She saw his car when she was driving in her neighborhood.  Soon the whole thing was glued back together, minus the tiny slivers that had not been salvageable.  She ran into him in public.  They agreed to meet.  It was late, a 24 hour restaurant.  They sat across from each other.  The conversation was stilted.  It was clear it was too soon to be here, too soon to talk.  It was clear this was not going to come back.  She went home.  The glue gave out, the pieces of the gift fell in on each other, a small pile of fragmented crystal on the base of swirls with the pink rose.

The remaining circular base sat in her hand.  The power of the crystal, as she had started to think of it in that wild imagination of youth, was gone.  With only that circular base left, the gift had no magic left in it.  She had thrown out the pieces long ago, but the base had been tucked inside this bag, wrapped in tissue, waiting.  Waiting for what?  She had no idea.  Waiting for this she guessed, waiting to be put out with all the other pain held in that bag.  Waiting to become part of the trash heap that represented moving away and moving on from so many things.

- - -

HO(me) Up, G’s Down

Fried chicken for breakfast? Yup. Fried chicken that’s so good you have to call the restaurant, not to reserve your table, but to reserve your chicken. Mr. Trizzle took The Legend out for breakfast to thank him for helping us unload my truck. I tagged along with them to Jodie’s, a local legend restaurant. One of the closest things to Southern Food you’ll find up here. My very spicy eggs were pretty darn good, and very cheesy. :)

We enjoyed our fabulously unique breakfast out on the sunny sidewalk. (Thank you Bay weather for cooperating and making it gorgeous today!) Chatted a bit with Jodie. Watched Mr. Trizzle run into a guy he went to HS with who’s now in law school and interning at a firm founded by a Vandy alum. Watched The Legend and some random girl try to figure out if they knew each other and fail. Fun times had by all. If you're ever in the Bay Area (ahem, Mary Ruth) I suggest you check out Jodie’s!

After breakfast, Mr. Trizzle and I went out to play house: laundry mat, grocery shopping. We have laundry in our building, but the one washing machine seems to have a special fondness for big fluffy things. It’s already chewed up over $200 worth of bedding. I wasn’t feeding it anymore. Especially not my quilts made by Mommy and Grandma. So, we packed up the rest of the bedding and the few other things that didn’t get washed earlier in the week and headed to the laundry mat.

I was a little apprehensive about going to the laundry mat. I mean, I already know so many Matts; I didn’t really want to meet a new one. Plus, I’ve always thought of laundry mats as scary, sketchy places for one of two types of people: poor people (I am poor, but I don’t want to be that poor, yet) and lonely old people who have no one to care for them (and by old, in this sense, I mean like 40).

The laundry mat had some of those people and some others. I guess it was ok, but I’m still a little weirded out by taking your dirty laundry out in public. It’s generally all balled up and in some sort of bag or basket so people don’t really see it. But then, when you start folding it there, everybody can see everything. This also greatly creeps me out. I’m glad the bedding’s washed. The washing machine in our apartment complex doesn’t seem to like the taste of regular clothes, no chewing there.

Grocery shopping was great fun, as always. For people with such different diets, I think we do a remarkably good job of making meals and buying groceries. Daddy would almost be proud of me, we saved 26% by using the in-store flyer to get things on sale. And, I’ve started saving coupons at home. :D

After our errands were done, we rested for a bit and then attacked the massive disaster in the back room. It’s looking pretty good now. Mr. Trizzle got a long, plasticy, table to serve as a desk and go his office part of the room all arranged like, well, like an office. Once that was done, I was able to get to my side of the room. I finally have a sewing table instead of a big mound of stuff. Soon, we will have curtains! There’s still a few things out of place - pens without a pen holder, random boxes - so no pictures yet.

A very good, productive, yet fairly relaxing Saturday. Oh yeah, and there was an earthquake, centered in El Cerrito!

When Four Equals One

The apartment is coming along nicely.  Still no photos, sorry guys.  I found the silverware yesterday.  That’s a big help.  There’s only a few things left I can’t find.  Unfortunately, it includes my make-up.  The entertainment center is up and partly filled, and there’s a nice reading corner with chair and little bookshelf in the living room.  Someday, when we get all the other boxes out of there, we can see about getting more than one chair.

The back room is now a “do not enter in case of earthquake” disaster area.  Boxes piled up over my head and piles of clothing covering a chair.  Getting to the table is nearly impossible.  Not that it matters, as that is also covered in stuff.  These are the boxes that are getting tricky; the where-on-earth-do-we-put-this boxes.  And the clothes, we you see, I thought I fit all my clothes and shoes in the closet.  Then we kept unpacking.  I had used clothes as packing material in boxes and had wrapped all delicate things, framed pictures, stereo equipment, trombone pieces, in clothing.  So, as we unpack more, we find more clothes.  This could get interesting.

Last night, I tried to use that crazy gas stove again.  Mr. Trizzle and I were working on dinner.  We planned to have roasted cob on the corn, bow ties, sauce and hot dogs (the last two for me and him separately, respectively).  Things were going all hunky dory until I tried to light the front left burner.  I turned the knob and the pilot light for the front right burner flicked.  Huh?  Guess I’m not using that burner.  So I tried to use the back left burner.  Turned the knob and again, the front right burner flicked.  What the?  So I tried the back right.  Same thing.  And the front right.  This time, it was a little different.  The pilot light flickered and the gas stream opened.  We had one lit burner. Great.

I had used the stove the day before and had no problems with any of the burners; this is a new development.

Mr. Trizzle discovered that the other knobs were still controlling the proper gas lines, just not the right pilot lights.  Luckily, some random restaurant in Nashville still has free matchbooks at their maître d stand, so Mr. Trizzle was able to light one of the burners with a match.  Anybody want to exchange an electric stove for a gas one?  It’s clean!