home improvements
Well, it's autumn. The trees are turning, leaves are piling up in yards and on sidewalks and streets, apples are crisp and fresh, and the weather is cool and sometimes sunny.
'Tis the season for nesting.
Toward the end of every summer I begin itching to improve my apartment. This time around I went a little bit nuts and bought three enormous new pieces of furniture, necessitating eight hours of arduous rearrangement which featured me dragging three six-foot bookshelves back and forth through every room to situate them just so, then changing my mind and dragging them back. Well, not even dragging so much as wiggling. Negotiating among the various corners of the bookcase base until it moved. I also purchased a DVD rack to accomodate my movie collection, a down comforter (first new comforter since my senior year of high school) with a lovely duvet, a few silk pillows (mmmmm), new sheets, towels, and dishcloths, and delicious red square-cornered dishes. I acquired three new houseplants to replace the ones I killed over the Summer of Depression through forgetting or refusing to water them.
And the feng shui is beautiful. It's consistently looking less and less like a transient place to rest a busy twenty-something head, and more and more like a settled home.
This weekend I added a few more touches to make it cozy. Over the week I spent some time poking around in an antique/junk store down the street from where I work. I wound up buying a lovely (though refinished) 1920s dresser for thirty-four dollars. I also came home with a weathered wooden drawer which I saw fit to convert into a spice rack, a weathered wooden beer crate which I turned into a shoe rack, and a cast iron skillet (I am in love with cast iron skillets). So today my friend Joan allowed me to make use of her minivan and chauferred me to the shop to pick up the dresser. I then came home with an old-fashioned spice rack with eighteen empty glass spice bottles (which I needed because I also spent the week stocking up on Indian and Asian spices, which all tend to come in plastic bags).
So I spent the afternoon drilling holes in wood and screwing things into drywall and studs. I hung both the new spice racks, rehung my kitchen pictures, and put a bunch of heavy hooks into one wall from which to hang my pots and pans and free my under-the-sink space.
The effect? Delightful. The usefulness? Astonishing. The sensation of having done it all solo? Immensely satisfying.
I've noticed MP and I continuing down a half-unconscious road over the past two years. Instead of using this time as singles to go out to as many clubs as possible to meet men, instead of cultivating our flirtatious demeanors and coquettish mannerisms, we've gone completely domestic. She knits and bakes, we both cook, I drill, and now we're taking on canning. I plan to learn knitting for myself this winter, and we've been talking about quilting.
This is not to say that we have no social life. Quite the contrary; usually our calendars are so full we forget what our living rooms look like. Yet in our spare time we're cultivating the old-time womanly skills which new factions of feminism are reintroducing to popular society, and which, with simple touches of homemade beauty and artfulness, render four walls a home.
Sometimes I think we're crazy. What guy our age is going to be out looking for a woman like us, when it's so much easier to coax a barfly home on a Saturday night? Or what guy our age isn't going to find our blossoming domestic goddesses as somehow adding to the terror induced by our bluestocking learning and wit?
But today I don't care. Yes, I drilled fifteen holes into my walls this afternoon by myself, to fix things to them. And it felt great.
Do I still want a man around? You bet. It's so nice to have someone to talk to when you wake up in the morning. And who else is going to kill spiders for me, or take out the air conditioners? But as for the smaller things, the rearranging, the hanging racks and lining the nest, I'm content to do that on my own. Because when I walk into my apartment I can call it home, and know that, minus the sweat of some wonderful friends of both sexes who helped carry all the heavy stuff upstairs, I made it that way.
'Tis the season for nesting.
Toward the end of every summer I begin itching to improve my apartment. This time around I went a little bit nuts and bought three enormous new pieces of furniture, necessitating eight hours of arduous rearrangement which featured me dragging three six-foot bookshelves back and forth through every room to situate them just so, then changing my mind and dragging them back. Well, not even dragging so much as wiggling. Negotiating among the various corners of the bookcase base until it moved. I also purchased a DVD rack to accomodate my movie collection, a down comforter (first new comforter since my senior year of high school) with a lovely duvet, a few silk pillows (mmmmm), new sheets, towels, and dishcloths, and delicious red square-cornered dishes. I acquired three new houseplants to replace the ones I killed over the Summer of Depression through forgetting or refusing to water them.
And the feng shui is beautiful. It's consistently looking less and less like a transient place to rest a busy twenty-something head, and more and more like a settled home.
This weekend I added a few more touches to make it cozy. Over the week I spent some time poking around in an antique/junk store down the street from where I work. I wound up buying a lovely (though refinished) 1920s dresser for thirty-four dollars. I also came home with a weathered wooden drawer which I saw fit to convert into a spice rack, a weathered wooden beer crate which I turned into a shoe rack, and a cast iron skillet (I am in love with cast iron skillets). So today my friend Joan allowed me to make use of her minivan and chauferred me to the shop to pick up the dresser. I then came home with an old-fashioned spice rack with eighteen empty glass spice bottles (which I needed because I also spent the week stocking up on Indian and Asian spices, which all tend to come in plastic bags).
So I spent the afternoon drilling holes in wood and screwing things into drywall and studs. I hung both the new spice racks, rehung my kitchen pictures, and put a bunch of heavy hooks into one wall from which to hang my pots and pans and free my under-the-sink space.
The effect? Delightful. The usefulness? Astonishing. The sensation of having done it all solo? Immensely satisfying.
I've noticed MP and I continuing down a half-unconscious road over the past two years. Instead of using this time as singles to go out to as many clubs as possible to meet men, instead of cultivating our flirtatious demeanors and coquettish mannerisms, we've gone completely domestic. She knits and bakes, we both cook, I drill, and now we're taking on canning. I plan to learn knitting for myself this winter, and we've been talking about quilting.
This is not to say that we have no social life. Quite the contrary; usually our calendars are so full we forget what our living rooms look like. Yet in our spare time we're cultivating the old-time womanly skills which new factions of feminism are reintroducing to popular society, and which, with simple touches of homemade beauty and artfulness, render four walls a home.
Sometimes I think we're crazy. What guy our age is going to be out looking for a woman like us, when it's so much easier to coax a barfly home on a Saturday night? Or what guy our age isn't going to find our blossoming domestic goddesses as somehow adding to the terror induced by our bluestocking learning and wit?
But today I don't care. Yes, I drilled fifteen holes into my walls this afternoon by myself, to fix things to them. And it felt great.
Do I still want a man around? You bet. It's so nice to have someone to talk to when you wake up in the morning. And who else is going to kill spiders for me, or take out the air conditioners? But as for the smaller things, the rearranging, the hanging racks and lining the nest, I'm content to do that on my own. Because when I walk into my apartment I can call it home, and know that, minus the sweat of some wonderful friends of both sexes who helped carry all the heavy stuff upstairs, I made it that way.
posted by The Prufroquette @ 3:48 PM
3 Comments:
At 11:32 AM, October 02, 2006,
none said…
"On risk of ridicule, hyperbole, and satire of what I write about, I am going continue to share what I have personally observed about dating and marriage. That is because this is a forum that claims to welcome men to post insight, comments, and advice on today's culture between males and females. If Jennifer wishes me to leave the forum at any time, I will gladly do so."
Fred, I will say (and others can confirm whether this is true for themselves) that I do welcome the male opinions on this forum. And we have often disagreed with each other (even amongst the female posters here) and I think everyone's cool with a little friendly debate. My issue with some of your comments is that you make statements about the current state of dating to young people who are actually dating (well, some of us - haha), and when we disagree with you based on our personal experiences, you presume to tell us that you know more about our generation than we do. It smacks of arrogance at worst and simply being out of touch at best, but in any event, it is always frustrating to discuss/debate with someone who, when confronted with oppposition, merely restates their contentious opinons without providing any support for their arguments.
As for your comments about the types of men in the world, well, I supose I would say 2 things:
1. As interesting as it is to hear about how things have changed, the behavior of men in the first half of the 20th century really has no bearing on my life as a single woman in 2006, and
2. I find that it is is counterproductive to try to understand people by putting them in boxes; things are rarely that black and white.
Funnily enough though, sbp, I have often wondered if my lack of domesticity would scare away a guy who really did want committment. I spend a lot of tume cultivating skills that don't make me more attractive to men, because, really, how many guys want a wife who can grow parasites in a dish of blood but can't bake cookies without burning down the kitchen?
At 3:05 PM, October 02, 2006,
Marianne said…
Sciencegirl,
Most of the guys I know would find parasites in a petri dish WAY more exciting than my upcoming experiments with heat, bacteria, and shelf-stability, aka "canning."
BUT, the thing is: I don't only talk about the domestic things: cooking, knitting, decorating. I actually spend abut 75% of my waking time in "higher academia" (which is very little like the military OR a prison) where I am kept busy discussing the intracacies of good writing, French literature, 20th Century Continental philosophy, etc etc.
Those domestic things are my hobby, my break, from my real (intellectual) work. Sure, they're "skills" but I'm pretty much crap at consistently living up to them. I had to spend two hours yesterday searching through the debris in my bedroom finally to reach terra firma. Enjoy whatever your hobbies are and just be a real person with passions and interests.
And, may I say, that I was treated last night to a fantastic dinner of chicken in wine with mushrooms prepared by one of my best guy friends. So, there are some guys out there with the culinary skills. We intellectual ladies who cook will reserve them for girls like you :-) I don't want to compete with another cook in my kitchen!
At 3:57 PM, October 02, 2006,
The Prufroquette said…
Another reason for my post, aside from celebrating domesticity (which, as for MP, is a hobby of mine -- to the extent that all the people who run the local international food markets think I'm crazy for wanting to make miso soup and rogan josh from scratch when I can buy it in a packet or a bottle), is simply to point out how much I love pounding holes in my walls.
Before I lived on my own I left all such arrangements to my dad. He hung all the pictures and shelves; I would grab a book and duck out of the room and let him go at it (which usually took some time and some swearing and pounded fingers). But now that I'm living solo I do it all myself. And it's not because I don't know any men that I could bully into it; I do. But a.) I'm impatient to just get the job done, which is best done on my schedule, and b.) in the words of my stubborn younger sister, "I do it mySELF."
I don't like asking people for help. I figure out a way to get by. And this is what pushed me past my fear of drills and hammers and screws and studs, into the wonderful world of doing stuff yourself.
It's really quite empowering. Yesterday I dusted plaster off my forearms and looked with satisfaction on a wall of pots and pans. Now, I don't have my dad's patience for measuring and using levels and plumblines to make sure everything is even, and my eye is rather whimsical, but everything is functional and attractive, and yes, folks, I did it myself.
I was inspired to be a sort of Miss Fix-It by my friend Meg, Queen of the Power Tools. She also never made me feel stupid during my first attempts at operating the jigsaw. Watching her cart around huge toolboxes with her tiny arms, I felt like I was in some kind of inspirational movie. I thought, I wanna do that too!!
I don't have her and her husband's workshop, but I've made do pretty well with my little battery-powered drill. This weekend I even figured it out for good and all, so that we can get along on much better terms.
Now where is it...I wanted to hang up my hair dryer.
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