home improvements

Bunny and I have lived in our current home for about a year and a half. We love it here. We have a beautiful two-bedroom townhouse, a big open living area, two balconies (the sketchtastic one and the party terrace), and we're in the middle of a great co-op community that we love.

We're settled, but we're not quite done. We've set up the living/kitchen area in such a way that works with our lives and reflects our tastes. Last summer, we bought my first pieces of real furniture (a couch and loveseat) that revolutionized the living area. But the rest of the house? Oh god, no.

We only use our bedroom for, well, bed and getting dressed so we haven't exactly spent a lot of time dressing it up. We our Valentine's bed that we got a few years ago, a hand-me-down falling-apart dresser and some random furniture that is essentially used to hang clothes. We need a new dresser, at some point, but we keep putting it off. It's not an essential.

The second bedroom is a disaster zone. We have a crazy ass bookcase that's overflowing in the worst possible way. We keep our chest freezer and Bunny's old (and largely unused) workout bench up there. We have two or three boxes that haven't been unpacked since we moved. (Is that a sign that I should just throw them out? We clearly have not needed any of these things in the past year.)

Worst, there's a pile of hanging things that we have not dealt with. A beautiful mirror, an heirloom wildlife print, a handful of small pieces of original art painted by people we care about (those, at least, are on display if somewhat haphazardly). There's a massive pile of unfilled picture frames that have been given to us over the past couple of Christmases (Christmas with Bunny's family is guaranteed to yield picture frames and smelly stuff for all) that we keep talking about filling and hanging and just haven't gotten around to. It wouldn't be a stretch for me to want to frame some of my cross stitches.

There's a lot left to do, and I'm a little sad that 18 months into living here there are so many basic things undone. We really need to hang the d*mn pictures.

However, the point of this was not (entirely) to rant about how Bunny and I are too lazy to finish setting up house. The point of this is to say: Bunny has a new office.

Well, it's not really new. It's still the second bedroom, and there is still a lot of crazy ass mess in there. For the past year he's been set up on this little dinky metal desk that he's had since he lived on his own in a junior one bedroom and had no space. There's also no overhead lighting in that room, which makes working there a pain in the ass. All that was fine, I think, when he was only putting in a few hours of work here and there. Now, though? Now that he's spending the full days working there, and that this is his primary job? Different situation.

Yesterday he came downstairs in the morning and said "I really need a lamp. Let's go to Ikea tonight."

In the afternoon it was "I would like to get a new desk. I don't have space for laying out my drawings and plans to refer to."

Now, normally I don't go for impulse purchases. You still want a desk and lamp in two weeks, fine. But just because we want something today doesn't mean it has to be purchased today. These seemed a little different. He genuinely cannot work without light, and if that's his 40 hours a week workspace I do genuinely believe it needs to be comfortable. The need for those things isn't going to go away in two weeks.

So, we bought a new desk and lamp. We are starting to reclaim our space! Wahoo!