Feeling it

We have officially crossed the threshold into the final 25% of The Project!

And, if I may say, not a moment too soon. I don’t know if it’s the cumulative stress of the renovation, the winding down of the college admissions process, the gnawing realization that Daughter #1 only has a few more months living at home, or just plain old perimenopause, but your girl is a bit of a hot mess right now. Look at me wrong and I will burst into tears.

As an example…the living room. This room is my Everest. It has become the nexus of all my anxiety about the entire Project: did we inadvertently fuck up the most important room in the house???

When we were working on the design for the house, the Husband and I agreed that the inside rooms would dictate the outside look of the house, and not the other way around. We do, after all, plan to live in the house. I was particularly adamant about the size of the bedrooms; all four of us already had our long-term furniture, and I wanted to make certain that all items fit comfortably inside. We did not, however, put a ton of thought into the living room, because it was just soooo much bigger than our existing shared space.

Our favorite furniture configuration is a couch and two chairs, and I remember roughly sketching out something that looked like this:

Once we stood in the actual framed room, however, we quickly realized that this was all wrong. For starters, I didn’t want my back to the stairs (the Husband did not mind this). But the primary reason this configuration was not going to work was that you couldn’t sit on the couch and see out that big beautiful door into the backyard. All you saw was the fence on the left side of the property.

Thus began an exercise that truly taxed the limits of my understanding of both the principles of interior design and geometry. Assuming you want to see the backyard from the couch, the only place the TV can go is the right wall. However, the room is over 15.5’ wide; if you put the couch on the opposite wall you are hell and gone from the TV. But…if you move the couch too close to the TV, you lose the ability to add more seating and you compromise the walking paths. I also needed to find a location for bookshelves, and don’t even get me started on the Christmas tree placement. I started to wonder how a room could somehow be too big and too small at the same time.

At the same time, my finicky family of four set out to try to pick a new couch. This, too, was a comedy of errors. Everything was too crunchy, too squishy, too low, too high, too deep, etc. In one moment of exasperation, I told the Husband that we were simply going to skip the couch altogether and each pick an armchair we liked. My frenzy was so full-blown that once Daughter #2 reached the safety of the Room & Board parking lot she looked at me with pity and said: “I do not know who that couch-crazed woman was in there, but she was not my mother.”

Anyhow, I think this is roughly the layout we’ll be going with. I’ll probably add a few end tables to the mix, but I really needed to get a sense of where the larger items were going to go. It’s got some margin-of-error built in to the positioning, so we can fiddle with the pieces when they are in the room.

Coming up this week: cabinets and college tours.