Restless Furniture and New Friends

For all those of you who have been holding your breath since the last time I posted about my room, today is the day you can finally exhale. There have been quite a few changes in the last few weeks.

Let's take a little peek at how my room used to be.

And now for how things look now!

There's obviously a lot more work to be done, but let's not talk about that - let's talk about how it got to this point.

If you'll remember, in the post about the new curtains a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I'd taken a trip to IKEA (that place full of wondrous happy dreams). Well, the curtains weren't the only thing I picked up while I was there. I also got a new duvet and duvet cover for my bed, a bedside lamp, and a few small picture frames. I was planning to do a post about these things last week, but I worked for the first half and was on vacation the second (post about that coming up!), so I was too lazy didn't get around to it. And in the interim, I went and bought a new bed when a local furniture store slashed their prices. (Seriously, I got it for less than one-third of the original price.) A significantly bigger, more comfortable bed. Hallelujah.

That's my kitchen on the left, and the hallway outside my room, looking in to the pantry, on the right.

Of course, it's a bit silly to have two beds in one room, so I needed to take apart and store the twin bed that was in my room.

This might have been true at one point (long, long ago), but I can attest that there was no "spinal care" or "back rest"ing going on while I slept on that thing.

I got this far without too much trouble, but then I ran into this:

I'm ashamed to admit it, but when I popped off the endcaps and saw this staring back at me, my mind went blank. Actually it more like, Great, what do I do with that? No screwdriver was going to get that thing out. I tried to persuade my roommate that we could maneuver the whole frame out of my room, down the hallway, through the kitchen, down the stairs to the basement, and into the storage room without wrecking the walls. She disagreed, and suggested I text some guy friends of ours that live around the corner. As I was walking over to borrow their tool kit, it came to me like a revelation: a socket wrench! From some dim place in the recesses of my childhood memories I remembered my dad teaching me what they were and how to use one.

Ten short minutes later, I had not only a tool kit, but a helper:

He wishes to remain anonymous. Actually I just can't take pictures, but it's a good excuse.

This is the tool kit he brought with him. Apparently boys have these things, though my dad did try to send me off to college with at least a screwdriver and a hammer. I'm not sure where they are, but he did try.

These are the bolts that were holding the bed frame together. They're longer than my palm. Pretty serious pieces of hardware. It still squeaked, though.

And voila! This (plus the sheets, of course) is where I've been sleeping since Tuesday. But my old furniture arrangement just wasn't going to work with this larger bed. The bookcase loomed over the frame-less mattress and box springs, and I couldn't push them all the way into the corner because of the awkwardly placed phone jack (!) and electrical outlet.

So this afternoon I whipped up this highly sophisticated, technical drawing:

I know, amazing, right?

And then I got down to work hauling my furniture all over my room, and ended up with this. I think it looks pretty darn close to the drawing.

This is more like what my bed looks like day-to-day.

And then I tidied up and stuffed a bunch of papers into my desk so that it looked like the picture at the top of the post.

Let me just say that this new, larger bed is pretty much the best thing ever. I like sleeping diagonally and sprawling, which is very difficult to do on a twin bed with a crater in the middle of it. And with no frame, my bed never squeaks. I'm not a fan of the "mattress on the floor starving college student" look, but I have a plan to remedy that and hopefully give my bed-on-the-floor a little class. Don't hold your breath, though, it's going to take a few weeks.

This post is already epicly long, but I want to show you my new duvet and lamp. Here's my new lamp, the JANSJO work lamp from IKEA in black.

I was planning to get the clamp variety, but when I saw it in person it was smaller than I liked and also $5 more expensive. Now that I no longer have a headboard to clamp it to, I'm glad my cheapskate ways made me choose the work lamp.

Sexy, right? I love the slim, flexible neck, and the LED light is much warmer and less blue than I expected. It also puts out quite a bit of light, and it's fantastic at night when I'm snuggled down in bed watching or reading something and I don't have to get out of bed to turn off the light when I get sleepy.

The other things I picked up at IKEA were my duvet and duvet cover. I went cheap here, too, but I did get the full/queen size instead of the twin, and I'm glad for that. The duvet I got is the MYSA STRA comforter with a warmth rate of 1, and the duvet cover is the EIVOR ORD. The cover isn't exactly what I would have chosen had money been no object, but I do like the alphabet design on it. I think it's pretty fitting for a book lover, don't you? I may dye it another color one day if I get tired of it being white, but we'll see.

As for the duvet itself, you might have noticed in the pictures that it's a bit lumpy. I accidentally dried it in the dryer. Without a dryer ball. So it clumped up and I cannot unclump the polyester filling. Thus:

The dark spots are the clumps of filling, and the light ones are where there's no filling. That was stupid of me, and it is a little annoying. But I'm forcing myself to live with it until 1) I figure out a way to pull out the ruined filling and stuff it with something else, or 2) I finally get tired of it and spend another $20 on a new one and do something else with this one. Until then, I haven't noticed it making a difference in how warm the various parts of me are, and I don't suppose anyone else besides me really cares.

So there you have it! Some restless furniture and a few new friends.