M. Suzanne Terry

This week’s Getting It Together plan is for the living room.

But first – a little regrouping/housekeeping:

• I still want to post recipes that I enjoy, particularly Mom’s recipes.  I love writing about food. I’ve gotten back into my rhythm of cooking and enjoying it, due in large part to rediscovering my love of reading cookbooks and foodie memoirs/fiction. But do you really need to see my detailed meal plan and grocery list? I do not think that you do.  There are more interesting ways to talk about food, and I am going to explore those ways.  You’re welcome.
• I have emerged from my miniature vacation feeling revitalized but also recognizing the need to tweak the summer’s schedule.  It was actually pretty easy to tweak.  Instead of before-and-after posts, though, I’m going to reserve the majority of the reveal for the next-to-last week (Reflect). I will make exceptions when something exciting like this happens:

Before:

 Sad books

After:

 Happy books

But most of the work will be revealed at the end of the summer.

Part of the reason for this is practical.  I have a budget for the summer, but the resources are coming in paycheck-to-paycheck, so while I can complete most of a plan during the week, some parts of some plans will have to wait until the next payday. The main reason, however, is that it’s just too much. My apartment is not that big, and a lot of the changes are not that drastic.  Also, I change my mind on some things as I move from space to space, so the official end of a week is never really the end of that week.  Trying to write about this project as if it is anything other than the constantly evolving process that it is just wasn’t working.

Now back to this week’s plan.

The apartment layout is just four rooms – bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living area.  The living area is roughly the same size as the other three combined. This is good, because I moved here from a fairly spacious two-bedroom apartment, so something had to make up for the loss of my separate media/library/office room.  This is also challenging, because I had to figure out how to separate the different areas – living, office, dining – while still pulling the room together as a whole.

The separating-different-areas thing?  I’ve got that down.  I am happy with the arrangement of the furniture.  That will stay the same.

The pulling-the-room-together bit? That’s a different story.

Some days, I walk into my apartment and am overwhelmed by how much is going on in this one room. As you might imagine, this does not have the relaxing effect that one would want coming home after a long day to have. Fortunately, another feature of this room is four identical windows – two on each outside wall.  I think the windows are the key to pulling it together.

The room is so large and full that I couldn’t get a good picture of all four windows, but here are the middle two:

I want curtains for all four windows that are not sheer and are the same, solid color.  I’m thinking red.  It’s a bold choice, but it worked in the other apartment, so I think it will work here, too. This poses a budgeting issue.  Matching curtain panels for four windows could be costly, so I will have to improvise.  I have accepted that, unless I get freakishly lucky, I will probably not be able to find what I want secondhand. But a quick measure of the windows reveals a wonderful thing: with a few minor sewing adjustments, a twin-sized flat sheet would be the perfect size. I can afford four twin-sized flat sheets. Of course, I will want a test run, so I’m going to use an old sheet set that I already have (and wouldn’t mind destroying, just in case my plan go horribly awry) that fits my color scheme for the bedroom. So if it works, I can use the test curtain on the window in the bedroom that is currently covered by an old, holey blanket (classy, I know).

The living room to-do list:

• Curtains!
• Declutter – behind the couch, the filing cabinet (both on top and inside), and the black bookshelf (which I realize, now that I’m thinking about it, will entail a complete reorganizing of all the bookshelves in the room, God help me)
• Find something simple yet interesting to do with the newly decluttered, usable spaces