Interior design.
Sometimes I hate living in a cramped rental house. I don't feel the urge to buy a house -- lord, no. I have no desire to cut grass or fix my own cupboards or buy a new dishwasher when one breaks. But I would love to afford to rent a larger house, a place with enough space for me to imagine things and decorate accordingly.
There's hardly any space here for the junk we have. I'm sure there's plenty I could get rid of, but there's plenty more -- like the basement full of books and Lego, the boxes full of college papers and old writings, Jonny's old clothes that are too cute to give away -- that I won't part with. Even so, the way this house is laid out, the most space that could be freed up along the walls would accommodate at most three bookshelves, one each in living room and both bedrooms. Not enough to bring my books back from their basement exile. Certainly not enough to proceed with what I want to do, which is buy bookshelves and fill them up with new books, such as a neatly organized collection of annual best-of anthologies and the like, and also a nice display case for my fossils and rocks and whatever else.
I would begin decorating the walls, at least, but I have zero idea what to do -- or rather, I have too many clashing ideas. It would be one thing to decorate a home office or writing room willy-nilly with framed geology maps, fine art prints, pictures from hikes, and prints of genre magazine covers, but that just wouldn't do in more public parts of a house. Too unfocused, too garish, maybe even trashy. I'd love to get some early-period Goya prints or something from the peak of Dutch realism, maybe something from the Hudson Valley school on another wall, but that wouldn't go with any of our living room furniture; the effect would be dorm-roomish. I dunno.
There's hardly any space here for the junk we have. I'm sure there's plenty I could get rid of, but there's plenty more -- like the basement full of books and Lego, the boxes full of college papers and old writings, Jonny's old clothes that are too cute to give away -- that I won't part with. Even so, the way this house is laid out, the most space that could be freed up along the walls would accommodate at most three bookshelves, one each in living room and both bedrooms. Not enough to bring my books back from their basement exile. Certainly not enough to proceed with what I want to do, which is buy bookshelves and fill them up with new books, such as a neatly organized collection of annual best-of anthologies and the like, and also a nice display case for my fossils and rocks and whatever else.
I would begin decorating the walls, at least, but I have zero idea what to do -- or rather, I have too many clashing ideas. It would be one thing to decorate a home office or writing room willy-nilly with framed geology maps, fine art prints, pictures from hikes, and prints of genre magazine covers, but that just wouldn't do in more public parts of a house. Too unfocused, too garish, maybe even trashy. I'd love to get some early-period Goya prints or something from the peak of Dutch realism, maybe something from the Hudson Valley school on another wall, but that wouldn't go with any of our living room furniture; the effect would be dorm-roomish. I dunno.