You see, I have been working on my anxiety for years. I get overwhelmed with the most insignificant things. Really hectic and difficult situations don't bother me too much, but I will lie in bed awake wondering how I should organize the laundry detergents. My mind gets tangled around how the books should be displayed and in what categories. When I was growing up, my mom would walk in my room several times a year to find me still awake after being up all night--my room completely different.
If I didn't have Harrison, one might walk in on me at 3 in the morning buried in an attempt to organize my organizer. Get it? I don't know why, but disorganization drives me crazy. And it's not that every facet of my life is even organized: I just think of it all the time.
To get on with the purpose of this post, Harrison finally let me repurpose the rooms in our house. Again, this was something that I talked about for nine months and nearly made Harrison crazy until he said yes, but I wanted a real purpose for each of our four bedrooms.
First, let me tell you that Harrison is one of the biggest collectors I know of kitsch and vintage items. And now that means I am, because it's everywhere I look.
Let me just walk you through. When you walk in, my favorite part is how the light reflects off the paint we chose for the foyer.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
We finally put up photos on the right wall, thanks to our friends JP and Kellie, who have been rocking the photo wall in their house for years now. Harrison liked that so we stole the idea.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
Store-bought art in frames that doesn't hold a shred of meaning is really lame, so I revamped my lame frames with some of Harrison's comics...Don thought it was pretty narcissistic.
Oh well, he doesn't live here. :)
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
To the left, the first room of the house used to be Harrison's office, but now it is our office.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
Redoing this room was the hardest thing to convince Harrison of. He was not happy when I told him that I wanted to share the red room with him. He loved his office, but it wasn't efficient. "It is my room! It's efficient for me!" he would tell me. I love how he gets when we do projects. He'll work real fast and he might get a little cranky, just because he'd rather be playing a video game. Then, he will get frustrated when it's taking longer than expected. But as soon as it's done, he's back to normal. He just hates the process of change...And that's where I come in to help him deal. :)
I bought a 16-cubicle desk from Ikea, and we shifted both desks to the back of the room. When we were building the desk, we realized that the shelves would have to extend, therefore separate the room. Harrison said, "Great, now you've moved me from an office to a cubicle." That wasn't what I intended, so I felt like a chump. Sigh. It turns out, though, it's not as small as we thought because we rarely are in the office at the same time. As long as I tuck my chair in, he should have enough room.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
Since the walls were already red, I went through the whole house and anything that was red or silly--I brought it in here. I absolutely love how this room turned out and it has grown on Harrison, too. He now has a whole equipment tower, thanks to the new TV stand we bought for the living room.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
Here's the new TV stand. It is so much more clean than having all that stuff on the tower. It feels good to be an adult.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
The living room hasn't changed, except for the addition of that rad lamp in the corner. Harrison built that from an old vaccuum cleaner. Our friends have already commented on it, and they are surprised to find out that we've had it all along, it just wasn't noticable where it used to be. I take that as a compliment.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
When I moved in, I had to scrub the all-male layer of Eww! off the surfaces and the first thing I redid was the bathroom. I girled it up. So nothing in the bathroom has changed this go round, but here it is. This little nook sits to the left when you walk in...
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
I love the checkered floors and the old people handles. I haven't had one accident...
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
When you exit the bathroom, down the hall, I added a mirror for my own viewing pleasure.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
My mom gave me this mirror and after weighing Harrison and then weighing Harrison again while holding the mirror, we subtracted the first from the second to discover that the mirror weighs 35 pounds! So H! had to get heavy duty anchors and we are just waiting for the big crash. If it does fall off the wall, the good news is that it only cost $20 and the bad--one less opportunity to look at myself.
Harrison loves these little wooden thingies to the left of the looking glass. In case you can't read them: "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all." Also, "Once a king, always a king, but once a knight is enough." Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk. What's funny to me is that even though I am surrounded by the things Harrison loves, I find it hit or miss when I aquire something he might fancy. He's hard to buy gifts for. I will discover, what I think, is something he might find amusing only to hear him say, "Huh, that is stupid." And the ones I don't notice, he adores. I don't get it.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
Moving on--Harrison, as I said earlier, has tons of stuff and previously, it had been everywhere. Masonic treasures lived among Sinatra and Vegas keepsakes and monkeys populated every shelf, table, and wall. We have so many monkeys that I can't contain them to one room. Nor would I want to--we only own cool monkeys and they are the staple of our designs. For real, I am going to quickly count every appearance of a monkey in each room. I'll report back.
Foyer: 3
Office: 3
Living Room: 12
Laundry Room: 0 (WTF?)
Kitchen: 5
Bathroom: 3
Library: 13
Bedroom: 8
Chill Room: 2
Tiki Bathroom: 9
Okay, this means that there are 58 places in my house where monkey figurine art stuff can be found. And this figure is always growing. Every year, we have Monkey X-Mas, which adds at least two new monkey items to the count.
But, back to the rooms. Now you can see, I needed order. So, I gathered all the Masonic stuff to the room below and now we call it the Library. We found a bookshelf at Target for $200 and we picked out some cool paint. This room used to be Facebook blue on top and eggshell white on the bottom, with a monkey wall border that Harrison refused to get rid of. So I worked it into the plan. Check it:
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
That orange swag lamp hanging from the ceiling used to be in his office, and the table lamp used to be in the living room. I thought they both looked like pineapples and since there are monkeys holding pineapples on the wall border, it made sense to put them all together and let them mingle.
Here's our cool bookshelf.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
By the way, when I was trying to round up all the books in the house, Harrison told me that he wanted to keep most of his books in the closet. "People who put books out are show-offs." :) I disagree.
In this picture, you can see the lamp--the shade is a fez with a tassel. Why wouldn't you want to display this? I mean, Harrison made it.
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The next room used to be my girly office/chill room, but I quickly discovered that I didn't want to chill where piles of work stared me in the face, which led to me feeling so confused in this room. Plus, lavender fell off my list of preferred colors, so I wasn't a fan of the east wall being purple. This is what replaced the lavender.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
We moved all of the Vegas-y stuff in here, including the bar.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
We put some of Harrison's old vintage items out, like that record player sitting on the brown chest. This room also has its own bathroom, which I didn't get a picture of, but it didn't change either--it's Harrison's tiki bathroom, absolutely apropos for the Vegas scene.
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
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| From Repurposed Rooms! |
So now, I feel at ease, thanks to Harrison being so understanding and helpful for anything I wanted to do. Well, mostly. At first he said something like, "You're taking over all my space!" But then later, he just said, "Yes, dear." He's only playing about the "Yes, dear," of course. It's not like I make him say that...
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