Run string across the cieling and drape feather boas from it.
I'm serious.
Floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the bedroom.
Hang blank sheets of copier paper on the wall. Call it minimalist art.
I want the place to match the personality.
Great straight line, but I don't know you well enough to respond.
I livened up my corporate apartment (a little bit, at least) with some cheap colorful placemats and throws from Target. Also, I've found that a real (and colorful) fabric shower curtain makes a HUGE difference in adding some color and cheerfulness -- it's the first thing I swap out in a new place.
The only thing currently hanging on my walls, other than curtains, are some pixelated Nintendo characters made of fuse beads. My fiancee can make some for you for a small fee.
Alternately you could get Chuck Close to make a giant painting of your face, and you could hang in on the wall next to an equally-sized blowup of the photograph that it was based on.
I don't know you well enough to respond
Reread the first part of the sentence, John.
...a nice collection of Native American pottery, some cozy floor rugs and plenty of world-music CDs.
More corporate apartment-ish tips: another way to cheaply add color and personality to a place you aren't going to be long is to pin up flags or interesting fabric. Mark has a huge American flag pinned to the wall in his living room and it does do a lot to liven the place up, but I couldn't handle that. You could pin up a rainbow flag.
Let's pretend I didn't say "liven the place up".
Why, don't like ending sentences with a preposition? Or too Mom/gay/gayMom?
Throw cushions? Oh, who am I kidding, I have no idea. Cover the windows with tinfoil so the NSA can't spy on you, and call it a day.
I have actually covered the windows of a place I was living with tin foil to block out the light (in college -- it was really sunny and I needed to be able to grab sleep whenever I could!) I mentioned this in passing in a conversation two weekends ago and everyone looked at me like I was a serial killer.
My neighbor has tinfoil over the windows. He has lived in the apartment for nine years. It is awesome.
16 - Rereading my comments, yes, it does sound like I'm instructing Labs to create a totally douchey apartment. But people who have been to my apartment in NYC can attest that it's not douchey. (I hope? Or is it?) A bit sterile, yes, but (I think) not douchey no longer beige!
Becks's apartment isn't douchey at all.
Get a shower curtain from here:
http://www.prankplace.com/psychoshowercurtain.htm
They have other fun stuff the next tenants will also enjoy.
You could get some fox skulls or maybe some colorful beetles or moths. Here we have a mouse in his wrathful, yet still whimiscal, aspect.
Put this on your wall for fun and profit!
Back away from the mice, w-lfs-n. I found them first. They're all mine.
I'd second Becks' advice: small colorful things, like tablecloths and placemats and shower curtains and little throw rugs. Stuff that's inexpensive, meant to be short-lived, and that you can sell or donate to the next tenant.
I say this as someone who hasn't put up anything on her walls. But I admire friends' apartments!
My freshman year of college my roommate covered our dorm room with American flags and the photos from the SI swimsuit calendar from the year before. He had gotten dozen copies of the calendar because the bookstore he worked at was throwing them out. He cut off the calendar part and festooned the room with the rest. No matter where you looked you saw the same pictures repeated again and again. Also some of the flags were upside down and others were rightside up.
You should decorate the apartment like that.
Becks's suggestions are all very good. You might also look into acquiring a houseplant or two that you can kill off slowly.
I was an RA in college. In one of the dorms, two of the RA rooms were extra coveted because they had private baths. Whenever someone found out they'd won the RA room lottery by getting one, they'd gloat about all the shower sex they were going to get to have. This girl Lisa (?) was assigned one of the extra special RA rooms my junior year and got really super excited about it. We were all nudge-nudge-wink-wink "I know why you're excited" and she said that Yes! it was So Awesome! because it had been her dream to have her own bathroom and shower so that she could get a map-of-the-world shower curtain and use her time in the shower productively to learn the location of all of the countries and their capitols. We all thought that suite was so wasted on her.
Also, Labs, buy a cheap lamp. Those furnished apartments never come with enough lamps and getting an extra or two makes a huge difference.
28: use her time in the shower productively to learn the location of all of the countries and their capitols.
That's a funny way to masturbate.
A friend of mine in college lived in a room with a slanted ceiling. There's a word for those. Gabled? But whatever. He covered the ceiling with those anti-motivational posters. The ones designed to look like the hokey believe-in-yourself crap but with nasty biting slogans?
Another friend glued 20-oz Sprite bottles to the ceiling, cap up, so when you looked up it was like you were in a pebbly green fishbowl.
Labs, are you really going to ditch everything you might buy for this new pad? If you get a medium-nice lamp as opposed to those awful plastic bendy IKEA cheapo lamps, could you take it back home with you?
Posters! And maybe you can make a bong out of beer cans or something.
It's that or window treatments, but those are too gay even for you, Labs.
Alternately, you can just give me your address and I can ship you a shitload of art and tchotchkes and furniture and stuff--I just got back from cleaning out my aunt's storage space, after all.
A highly original decorating idea, complements of British Air:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-In-flight-Deaths.html?ex=1174968000&en=5cd021899f494d3f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Makes a dynamite Halloween Party.
Get bamboo as a plant. Even I can't kill the stuff, and I'm death on houseplants. And put up some art. If you go the dogs-playing-poker and Elvis-on-velvet route, no one will know whether you've just got execrable taste or whether you're making a philosophical statement on the prevailing American aesthetic. Or buy some mounted canvases at the local art store, drip random blotches of paint on them, and sign them in an illegible scrawl. Mount them as a group and tell people you feel that you are fortunate to have been able to purchase this quintessential set of paintings before the artist immolated himself. Ask them if they don't agree that the mystic realism of the Jungian expression of his suicidal depression comes forth in stark contrast to the tender violence of his love for [enter random noun here]. Eight out of ten people will agree with you.
Alternately, decorate in the style of the Addams Family. I have a vase of rose stems in my dining room. [Imagine Morticia snipping off the blooms.] People are never sure whether to ask if my flowers died or not.
How about wall stickers - they are all the rage here!
39: Ooooh, fingerprints. Decor CSI.
We're frightfully House & Garden at number 7B
The walls are patterned with shrunken heads:
Ever so very contemporary.
Our boudoir on the open plan
Has been a huge success,
Though everywhere's so open
There's nowhere safe to dress.
With little screens and bottle-lamps
And motifs here and there
And mobiles in the air
And ivy everywhere
You musn't be surprised to meet a cactus on the stair
But we call it home sweet home.
I am somewhat comforted to hear that your ideas and mine are along the same lines. I'm thinking of getting some sort of fabric for the windows, and to use as a sort of shelf-covering hanging, so that visitors need not-- but can, if they desire-- see my t-shirts and underwear.
The flag is an excellent idea, but I insist on a flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Helpy-chalk's minimalist ideas are very good; I might just make distorted photocopies of randomly selected bits of John Hawthorne's Knowledge and Lotteries.
Another suggestion, via a correspondent: flea markets sometimes have cheap oddities that can be hung on the wall with good effect.
Oh-- this changes everything. I forgot to mention I have a glue gun.
Why not get a pet? Like a hamster, or goat.
I had friends who lived in a basement apartment in college, one that required going down a treacherously steep set of stairs to reach. One drunken night, one of the residents fell down the steps while holding a glass and gashed his hand pretty good. Inspired, he used his bloody hand to write "KILL THE PIGS" and "ACID IS GROOVY" in big letters across the front door. The property management company didn't take kindly to it, but if you have a cooler landlord, you should at least consider it.
Like a hamster, or goat.
Oh yeah, especially since you have a glue gun.
43: Subject sensitive invariantism!!!! SUBJECT SENSITIVE INVARIANTISM.
With a glue gun you might be able to affix googly eyes to your Islamic Republic of Iran flag.
With a staple gun, on the other hand, you might actually be able to put up a shelf covering with a decent lifespan.
tablecloths and placemats and shower curtains and little throw rugs.
I have no table, so no place for a tablecloth or placemat. I have a little rug-- you know, for salaat-- but I was hoping for more wall-based ideas. Ogged might be onto something with these boas.
Yes! I'm a contextualist at heart, you know.
You have no table? Not even if the standards of discourse are low?
SSI = 'I'd like to be a contextualist but De/Rose is better at it than I.'
Good point, Cala, but here we have an interesting question. I use a bar stool as a table; it performs table-like functions. Is it a table, in this context?
Interesting. Tables are kind of 20th century. I have one, but it's strewn with medical files and gadgets; I never sit down to it. I use a side table-ish thing as a laptop stand and place for food and such.
That's because you live a lonely, joyless life, ogged.
Not every w-lfs-n would agree with that, Ben.
I concur with 56. I have a table, and don't use it, because I live a lonely, joyless life, and comfort myself by watching Buffy while I eat my lonely, joyless stir fry.
And FL, I'm sure there's a worm whose slice performs the same function as the table, so we just have to do our mereology properly.
One of the things I have begun to realize is that the key to order in a house full of messy people is to have lots and lots of tables of all sorts. If there are enough places to put the mail, then inevitably someplace is going to be clean enough to eat on.
Three words: Plastics and plants.
Get a couple of plants and colorful planters. Target is relatively inexpensive. Buy some colorful plastic bowls and plates.
I like to have lots of tables where one might put stuff but then to patrol them ferociously so that they never in fact do have stuff on them.
61 -- Or in combination: plastic plants.
Maybe some nice synthetic ferns...
62: You might as well marry the Mormon cousin and have the kids.
My parents were far more dictatorial about it, successfully so. I may not have been spanked for leaving shit out as often as I was for interrupting or running away in parking lots, but it was a pretty big sin.
Emerson, all of my male cousins over the age of 20 are already married.
JM, are you my roommate? The number of minifights we've almost had because I put something on the table.... that's what tables are FOR. To put your glass grapes on.
68: Huh. Maybe I should try beating PK and Mr. B. both.
69: how much pressure is put on a 20 something if she isnt married?
What I really object to is stuff that's out on the table because it doesn't have a home. Find it a home! And put it there!
This is a nice theory, but I'm married to a packrat. And I myself have been known to leave half-read books lying around.
72.--Eh, not that much, in my family. There's a bit of wheedling, a bit of projection about how wonderful and happy you should and can be, a bit of mourning that you don't have a jolly big family of your own, a bit of not giving you as nice a guest room... Okay, some.
Clearly, I will never marry your husband, B.
One of these people was raised by strict Mormons...
I like my homeless books. Books live under the bed, in wild roving packs.
I am with Cala. Books go everywhere. On tables, desks, under the bed, on the shelves, etc.
Good God, I thought this was the prissy blog.
My will isn't strong enough to overcome my genetic inability to organize.
"My will isn't strong enough to overcome my genetic inability to organize. "
That is mighty possessive since we've only just met.
I have a genetic problem with organizing as well. My mom is a packrat who when pressed to get rid of some junk wants to give it to Goodwill. After all, someone must want it, even if it is missing most of the pieces.
Various women have helped pulled me out of "totally messiness" into "slightly disoganized."
Well, marry a nephew then. It's not too late. Or be a junior wife. You need someone to pester.
buy cheap frames at the thrift store and then either some cheap softcover art book like by phaidon or old magazines (the ads in 60s playboys are awesome) and frame a bunch of similar images in different frames. then hang them up in a staggered arrangement. looks great, I'm telling you. also, your own old photos in thrift store frames. you can get silverplate bowls cheap at the thrift store for cheap. polish them up, put water in, and float flowers in them. you can find things like camellias and gardenias outside for free, depending on where you're living. silver plate mint julep cups are also good; just fill them with a single type of cheap flower and no filler. a nice cheap window treatment is to get lengths of bamboo (also can be free) put them on brackets and then drape cheap fabric over them. polyester saris are good for this. finally buy lots of cheap glassware (vases etc.) at the thrift store, but all in one color (green is easy...) put them all together on something.
The best fixup is not visual -- it's aural.
Get a really, really good stereo rig, and start building up your music collection.
Even the most minimalist environment comes alive when high-quality tunes are blasted into it at high volume. I know quite a few hipsters living in rat-infested warehouses who use this trick to no end.
Plus, when you move, you can take it with you.
Jackmormon would spontaneously combust upon walking into our home. Rah and I leave everything everywhere. Books are for making small tables for other things, onto which can be set more books. He's been trying for weeks to get me to go through the mail I have piled up on the kitchen table. My mother is so bad with mail that she just shoves it into drawers and sewing baskets and magazines - anything to get it out of the way and not deal with it.
Is cleaning off tables especially important to JMs sect? Like keeping kosher, or the Mennonites who can't wear buttons?
I am personally driven to distraction by table-clutter, so every few days I freak out and move all the stuff on the table to, say, the desk.
Books, however, are allowed to go anywhere and everywhere. That's SMART clutter.
FL: what about sticky-tacking up some attractive postcards or pieces of nicely-patterned wrapping paper?
Has anyone here ever had more shelf than books? I haven't.
I misread 85 as "rat-infested whorehouses."
Back on topic, Labs is lucky this place will do mail order. Nothing like a few "animal remnants" to liven up a place.
nicely-patterned wrapping paper?
Like Drusilla from The Remembered Visit.
You seem to be suffering from some confusion between wrapping paper and the insides of envelopes.
Labs is lucky this place will do mail order
A friend of mine designed The Bone Room's website several years ago (though it appears to have been redesigned by somebody else since) and took his payment in product.
Not at all, LB. Drusilla didn't just like the insides of envelopes.
