Home Decor Angst, Part II

Painting update: I took a couple of days off recently to finish painting my apartment, and on Monday I slathered on the last bit of paint onto my bedroom wall (Did angels sing at that moment? I could have sworn I heard something like that!!!! LOL). My living room is a wonderful yellow (rich, fresh, with a hint of green), my bedroom is two tones of blue (one wall a warm denim colour, the others the blue much like a summer sky), and the extra bedroom is a warm teal/wedgewood colour. I'm probably a little biased, but I think the colours look terrific.

From there I immediately launched into the second phase of home improvement - furniture. I bought some extra seating for my living room, and am currently obsessing about which bookcases and storage I should buy. I'm desperate to have storage with proper doors so I can put things out of sight and so I can limit the cleaning/dusting I have to do (with two cats, this is a priority!). I've been haunting Ikea looking at one of their lines of storage, and I think it'll look great in my apartment (especially with the black doors and the glass doors). I just have to figure out how much of it I actually need, how much storage would look right in the space that I have, and how much I can afford. I need to start looking for a roommate again (to help pay for all this! LOL), but I need to have some storage first to help tidy things up around here. (After moving stuff around for the painting, my apartment is looking a tad disorganized!)

Sometimes I just shake my head at the *things* we accumulate ... small kitchen appliances, for example, are a challenge for me. I have an electric mixer, a food processor, a large crockpot, an electric grill, and a blender. I'm embarrassed to admit how little I use them. But maybe that's because they are currently stored in my linen closet by the bedrooms because I don't have enough storage space in my kitchen? LOL So what is one to do? Give away/sell appliances I want to use but don't? Or try to make the space more functional so that I will use them?

Another challenge is books. I am a veritable bibliophile. I have thick biographies on Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Harry Truman, and Lord Mountbatten. I have large books on the Ottoman Empire, Polish culture, Eastern and Southern Asia, democracy, forest ecology, conservation biology, the history of military submarines during the Cold War. I don't know when I am going to have the time to read them (it would be easier if they were lighter so I could carry them on the subway and read them to and from work), but I want to read them. In fact, when I bought them, I'm sure I realized that I wouldn't read them right away (perhaps not for years) - but I wanted them as placeholders, as resources I could have available to me should I ever have an opportunity to read them.

Do these things we accumulate really make us happy? I'm not sure, but I'm not ready to throw them out either! So bookcases and storage it is ... :)

Anyway, this conundrum should keep me fully occupied all weekend! :)

Eclecta