Ch-ch-ch-changes (in living space/head space)

[lagilman]

I am not what you might call a fan of Routine, at least not where my living/working space is concerned.  As a kid, I used to come home periodically and Change Everything in my room. When I was in college, I routinely (at least once during the school year, usually twice) rearranged my furniture. Even when I was working in a wee cube, I found a way to change it up on a regular basis. It was, I suppose, both my rebellion against standardization, and a way to keep my surroundings from stagnating (monotonous surround = monotonous interior?).

When I lived in a larger house (we had 11 rooms, incl the basement. For 2 people. Insanity), the space overwhelmed me, and I could barely bring myself to do anything, even when I knew I needed to. An oversized living space is, for me, worse than a small one.  It sucks the energy out of you...

Now that I'm in a NYC apartment, where my 750+ square feet is considered good-sized for a one-bedroom, I find myself in the happy medium of not needing to change things, but having the desire/energy to do so. Over the time I've been here, the living area has been in a constant flux, finally - with the purchase of the new sofa - settling into a nice, flexible arrangement that can be changed-up according to the day's need. Plus, I have what I refer to as the Modular Office - the desks and chairs rearrange easily to create different working configurations (or to become a formal-ish dining area). 

This is probably the key to apartment living, for someone like me: make sure everything's flexible. Except the bookcases. I never want to move another bookcase EVER.

[random aside: my old boss, an architect/designer, haaaaated sectional pieces.  For a woman who specialized in smaller houses, she never quite 'got' the concept of flexible arrangements.]

Anyway: having more-or-less figured out the public and working spaces (and having had the kitchen renovated to my specs) is probably why, this weekend, I looked at my bedroom and decided that four years with one set-up was long enough.

[cue furniture moving, much consultation, and some moderately freaked-out felines]

The original set-up had decent feng shui, I suppose (except the beam-over-my-head), and it looked nice, but I always felt that the room wasn't being used to its full potential, with half the space "hidden" on the other side of the bed [and therefore rarely used], and having to walk past a large window to get clothes out of the dresser was, um, occasionally awkard. So now the bedroom has terrible feng shui (head to the window, feet at the door), and it's a little cramped on either side of the bed (about 3' of clearance on either side), but the dressers and the closet are now at the far end, closer to the bathroom door, so it feels more like a suite set-up.  Overall, it's a better use of the space - this is where I sleep, this is where I get dressed/have room to do yoga, and the tv rotates to either face the bed, or the open space (for Wii, etc).

I'm not sold on it yet, entirely.  I think I'll keep it a week, and see how it does.  But I will tell you - the past two nights have given me the weirdest, most vivid, reality-based dreams.  I know some people would consider that a negative: I find it fascinating.


So.  For those of you who made it all the way through, or just skipped to the bottom: are you a "set and settled" householder?  Or do you shift with your whims?

Comments

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I used to do deal with living space boredom by moving every year. That was...some years ago.

Nowadays, I'm not bored so easily, and it's more important that things be more-or-less tidy than everything be changed around. Though we did take the...opportunity of redoing the front of the house to rearrange the kitchen and living room insofar as they can be rearranged into more sensible configurations. Small changes that make it easier to move around.

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

Being lazy, I tend to let things stand where they are. I did do a big rearrangement/switcharound of the second floor a couple of years ago, to turn what used to be my husband's den into something resembling a guest bedroom. That left the third, mostly unused "bedroom" as a jumbled stash/mess. Its day is coming, however...as is the day of my entire house/garage/yard; I'm downsizing from a two-story, three bedroom, one bath home to, basically, homelessness (for a bit). This house is WAY too much for me on my own, so I know exactly what you mean by a too-big home overwhelming you. And, as I said, I'm lazy.

My aim is a teensy tiny apartment in Paris for a few years (living *very* frugally), then back here to the States to find an agreeable location and a *little* house just my size. I figure, after three years in a 12 m2 garret, a one-bedroom house with separate kitchen and bathroom will seem like a palace.

[lagilman]

My aim is a teensy tiny apartment in Paris for a few years (living *very* frugally), then back here to the States to find an agreeable location and a *little* house just my size. I figure, after three years in a 12 m2 garret, a one-bedroom house with separate kitchen and bathroom will seem like a palace.

I think this is a wonderful and wonderfully reasonable goal. :-)

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

Thank you. So do I. :^)

[fakefrenchie.livejournal.com]

I do too. (Full disclosure: I live in France, not in Paris, but not far.)

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

Also lazy here, living space-wise! The one big change in the studio where I've lived since 2002 was adding a custom-built bookshelf that my dad made for one particular short stretch of wall where nothing else fit very well. Generally I move stuff only when it absolutely has to be moved. Maybe that's fallout from being a Navy brat and moving (on average) every year-and-a-half as a kid. It was necessary quite a lot of the time!

So yeah, I tend to be "set and settled."

[safewrite.livejournal.com]

Glad you found that balance. It took me a while: the worst was living in a one-bedroom apartment with three children (not by choice.) I've lived in way-too-small places for so long that I became an expert in what I call 'vertical storage management.' Walls are very underutilized places in larger homes, and I find that it irks me.

Thankfully I'm no longer renting, and in a house a little larger than your apartment which is quite large enough. But my discomfort is that there are not enough shelves on the walls. For now I have some IKEA bookshelves and some of those L-strap standalone shelves from Lowes. But I have grand plans for built-in shelves, all over the house, one room at a time. Shellllvvves....

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Shelves. Oh yes, shelves.

One annoyance for me is that the first house we lived in, up in the very small town of Enterprise, Oregon (waaay back in the northeastern corner of Oregon, seventy miles from any fast food at the time, no stoplights in the county, two thousand in the town, seven thousand in the county), while small, had WONDERFUL storage. To wit, a full closet in the bathroom, including a separate closet with shelving. Both bedrooms had closets. Wonderful place. Now gone, sadly.

First apartment in PDX had a full pantry in the kitchen and good storage (new apartments and the manager was an opinionated middle-aged lady who had a word in the design, ergo, full kitchen pantry right behind the stove, only 24 inches wide but floor to ceiling with good shelf spacing). Then our first rental house was an old cottage-style, 1920s place with TONS of storage. Drawers below the short closets, shelves above the hanging space in the closets. Linen closet next to the bathroom--big, deep linen closet with shelves up top and drawers down below. Broom closet for electricity and storing vacuum cleaner. Big deep floor-to-ceiling pantry. Tiny house, but you could store a lot.

After that storage went to pieces. Made me crazy. The first house we bought had NONONO storage to speak of and it made me crazy for fifteen years.

Current house is somewhat better, but still not optimal.

[lagilman]

I am extremely fortunate in having the right amount of storage space (for one non-packratty person). Six closets, one of which became a pantry and one a utility closet, but that still left a coat closet, a linen closet, and two bedroom closets (one of which is full of author copies but oh well...)

I am also a firm believer in multipurpose furniture. For'ex: the coffee table is also a display table (glass-topped) with a storage drawer below that. If it is a table, it must also have a drawer (or two).

[safewrite.livejournal.com]

And I envy you. I had to rough-finish our can't-stand-up-in-it attic and install pull-down stairs to have a ghost of a chance of having enough storage. And multi-purpose furniture is fine, but I agree with you on moving bookshelves. So since we own instead of rent, built0n bookshelves mean we will never have to move them again.

[wolfsilveroak.livejournal.com]

One can never have enough shelves.}:P

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

We're not having much of a choice at present, due to new lodgers (ccame home today to find A. Whole. Load. of stuff shifted about but this is probably a good thing, and is not actually in the house per se. I came home last year to find, suddenly, a working forge on the premises). Things in the house have changed radically due to setting up a room for books, and since then T, who is more into change for change's sake than I am, has shifted a lot of stuff about: it's working better. (OTOH, the kitten has stolen all my socks and stashed them somewhere, but can't find where -not really the same sort of issue, though).

[6-penny.livejournal.com]

I gutted my kitchen 6 years ago. It was a much needed renovation and is beautiful now, but I still catch myself reaching for a critical utensil in a nonexistent cupboard!

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

We had new bits added to the house about 6 years ago, so that things would (possibly) work better and the marquis could have a new, bigger kitchen. The net effect has been to cause me to spend more time in one room -- my writing space is in our bedroom, which is sort-of two storey. And it's built in. Changes tend to be to stuff -- new chair last summer, for instance -- rather than for layout. But we don't tend to move things around much because we have various bits of rather large furniture donated to us by the marquis' parents, and limited places to put them (due to the very large number of bookshelves and bookcases).
On the other hand, the marquis now has his forge set up, and the house is no longer full of things like the forge bed, the anvil, the huge table, all the tools etc, which came indoors for most of last year while the workshop was a-building. That is a change I am very pleased with.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I would shift more but the DH and DS are rather Aspie in how they like the house arranged...minimal change. I change up my office space on a six-month basis. A lot depends on the functionality of the space. I'm not happy with my classroom at work, but it's dependent upon the needs of what technology I have, and I still use an overhead projector. That cuts out the front third of the room, plus my phone is at one corner and my Internet is at the opposite corner. So more room is taken up by teacher space than is necessary. OTOH, it does give my aide her own desk area and place to pull kids aside to work with them as needed, and I do have one private little corner for a particular student to go hide in and read a book (necessary for middle school sped).

For years I didn't have a space to grow good big plants. Now I have this at work (but budget cuts mean the plants I leave there need to be cold-tolerant) and at home, and all of a sudden I have Big Plants to manage in my space. That's totally new and requires thought. I'm still learning that trick (rubber plants, especially, require management thought).

[lagilman]

Plants, yes. I don't have the mega-green thumb my mom does (she managed to grow miniature (producing!) orange trees, indoors, through NJ winters!) but the apartment is filled with plants of various sizes, and I was just thinking that I needed a large floor-based plant for the bedroom, now. Something that doesn't need direct light, and isn't cat-toxic...

[jennetj.livejournal.com]

We used to have plants. Then we got cats. Within 2 months they'd denuded the 6-year-old bamboo and dug up the sansaveria, and with the advent of Perdy, who thinks herself a vegetarian, she slaughtered the last of the african violets. This winter she's completely eaten the lovely parsley we brought in from outside. She doesn't like the rosemary (too strong, probably), so that one's safe, but everything else is fair game. We're considering growing some plants specifically for her to eat, except she'll eat them faster than they grow. We give her lettuce regularly and she'll chomp it down.

[lagilman]

I can't even try to grow herbs indoors any more: they get et before they have a chance to grow. Other than that, the only plant at risk are the spider plants. I have one in a hanging pot, where it's safe - the others are constantly tooth-marked and gnawed. It's very sad.

(thankfully, they leave the Audrey III (the aloe) and the jade plants alone, and so far, only like to pat at the leaves of the money-tree...)

I need to get more plant-hangers installed. I keep thinking that, but haven't done it yet.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

I think that it depends. Some rooms my wife and I tweak on a regular basis, but others we leave alone. I'll be honest in that we probably don't dust as much as we should for a household with five people and two hamsters (and never underestimate the amount of dust the hamster bedding can generate), so when I dust I reorganize.

[seachanges.livejournal.com]

Most of my furniture is too heavy for me to move by myself. Also, the way the house is laid out severely limits my choices, so I haven't rearranged much of anything since I moved back home. What does get shifted around are the smaller things, like art and photos and nicknacks. I've collected a lot of prints over the years, and I like to periodically swap out what's on the walls.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

The bookcases are pretty much set, and I swirl the other things about them. Or not.

Mostly its all about how to fit another bookcase in, and what has to be shifted to accomodate that.

[jennetj.livejournal.com]

My bedroom is too small to do too much rearranging (pretty much everything is where it fits), but I've done tweaking over the years. The living room is pretty well set now that we've got the modular cubes on the long wall, though the chaise switches sides during the holidays, to make room for the Christmas tree. The back bedroom (aka the sewing room aka the cats' room) is probably the most fluid, as we've yet to find the "perfect" arrangement for working and storage. Roomie rearranges her room frequently as she tries for ever increasing efficiency of space. And the basement is, shall we say, a work in progress.

[wolfsilveroak.livejournal.com]

I tend to rearrange as often as the mood takes me. The husband, on the other hand, is a set it and leave it kind of guy who can't quite understand my need sometimes to arbitrarily move shelving around or rearrange things when, to him, they were just fine where they were.

Luckily he agreed with my desire to redo the kitchen}:P And to paint the house, tear up the carpets, refinish the floors... LOL.

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

I don't shift it up much. Mostly because the furniture and space is not that flexible. I'm feeling the urge to paint though. To make changes that way.

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

On space efficiency: Looking through the online listings for literally thousands of Paris apartments, one thing that stands out is that they really use the heck out of what they call "mezzanines" and I guess we in the US would call raised sleeping platforms. The bed is a mattress, pillows & bedding 6 1/2' or 7' off the floor, with ladder access (rarely, built-in steps), leaving the area below it available for couch, table/chairs, shelving, etc. I like it - though at my age, I'm not convinced having to climb up and down a ladder to get into and out of bed is such a great idea. But space-saving, yes! Maybe use that platform for (tidy and decorative) storage...?

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

My mind boggles at the idea of a house that's 'too big'. Have never had what feels like enough space or the right space, and in addition tend to live with arrangements until something destroys them...the way the baby grand now in the living room did the living room arrangement. Although the room our son lived in now has a drafting table and will (if I can ever clear the debris enough to move it) have a side table that's now in the office with me for all my drawing stuff, some wall-hung yarn storage, and a chair other than the drafting stool. Perhaps it's having grown up in a smaller town in more open country, but for me more space is relaxing (until it gets cramped because I do a lot of different things, all of which have their requisite tools, materials, etc. to be stored, accessed, and used.) Every dream house I've designed (not built!) is big, with multiple rooms each designed for its use, and I would flow from one to the other without having to dig into, stumble over, and right with the residue of the other projects.

We had a 750 square foot house once, but it also had a garden and a garage and it was very early in our marriage.

[neko-san.livejournal.com]

I am insanely lazy. Once I put furniture somewhere, it stays; it usually doesn't even occur to me to move it. I whine a bit when my sweetie suggests moving things around (which isn't that often); I find it highly disconcerting for a few days,but then the new arrangement becomes "standard" and I again have no desire to move things.

I really need to rearrange the craft room, though. Gargh.

[jennielf.livejournal.com]

My husband shifts the living room and his desks around on a semi frequent basis. I put furniture where it goes, and the furniture doesn't move. We currently live in a one bedroom apartment - The living room changes frequently, my desk doesn't move. :)

And the cats! My elderly cat hates it when he moves the furniture around. She just sits and stares and tries to get in the way. It is quite funny, in a poor thing kind of way.