New Year, New Rooms

It all started when I realized that I don't like the couch we snagged from my father a few years back. It's the couch that my family bought ten or twelve years ago. And four cats and a dog have, at various points during that time, added to the demise of this piece of furniture. Addy and Nosey have done the most damage, probably mostly Nosey with the daggers she used to have. It's got that "I've been around for a decade or more" musty smell. And the sofa's sleeper mattress is about as comfortable as a bed of assorted and ill-placed rocks. At some point while we were in Oklahoma, I saw one of those "no interest financing until 2007" commercials for a furniture store and realized we had a way out of Couch Hell. I brought this up to Mark, and he agreed we could take a peek at what was available and consider our budget.

Tuesday night we decided to peruse the sofa selection. (This was after we went to two Best Buy stores in attempts to spend the gift certificate my father and stepmother gave us. What kind of idiot buys only 19 copies of "Pirates of the Caribbean" for a store the week after Christmas? This same idiot will apparently keep the store stocked with at least 200 copies of "SWAT".) We wandered the store's showroom, finding a few possibilities. Then we found it. The color was perfect, the style was perfect, the price was pretty good. The store only had no interest financing for a couple months, though. Thus began the budgeting discussion. I might point out that I was the voice of caution in this talk. Mostly. OK, so I did say (once) that we could make the old couch work, I wouldn't like, but we'd make it work. But only once and it was uttered between two very serious financial concerns. But Mark said we could afford it. So we bought the couch. And the chair and ottoman to go with it. I still have trouble figuring out how that happened. I can follow the logic, but it was just so different from my expectations and even wishes for the furniture shopping night.

Buying new furniture means you have to make room for it. We were up past midnight after we chose the sofa, preparing the apartment for it. This involved rearranging the study - something I had already been thinking of doing before the sofa issue. My desk had been crammed into a corner and the entire layout of the room seemed contrary to what I needed in a writing environment. Not that it had been a problem since I was revising and using the dining room table to get more space. But I imagined it would become a problem in 2004 as I started writing new stuff again. So Mark and I tossed around some ideas and came up with a great new look for the study.

Both new rooms were put to the test yesterday. Our furniture was delivered bright early in the morning (7:30 - we went back to sleep after it arrived). Mark watched football on the new chair and promptly approved of it by falling asleep in it. Nosey immediately found a new perch on the ottoman and the sofa back. Addy is still on the fence about the new furniture, but she loves the new study set up. We moved our old chair into that room. This chair has been Addy's favorite sleeping spot. She really enjoys its new location. It's much more secluded than it used to be, and a little patch of sun hits it. In fact, Addy so loves the new spot that I had to fight her for it yesterday. I would get up to take a quick break from writing and go back to find my cat curled up and sleeping on the chair. This continued all day long. I also like the new set ups. The chair in the study became an excellent spot for revising. And my computer is more accessible now, allowing me to spend quite some time last night grabbing songs of my CDs so I can put together novel-appropriate playlists.

It's nice to start the new year with obvious physical changes. Makes it easier to work on those internal changes. More thoughts on what I hope to change internally later. The ideas are still rather nebulous in my brain, but I do know it involves the concept of balance.