moving furniture

When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was move around the furniture in my bedroom.  I was constantly trying out new configurations and as I got older, I even created scale-model templates of my furniture and had a graph paper template of my room to help me try out arrangements without having to push my heavy oak dressers back and forth across the room.    

One of the hard things about leaving my house in Cleveland is abandoning all of the decorating plans and projects that I had in mind but had not yet gotten to.  And although my "stuff" is just about all over the farmhouse I'm sharing with my mom, the only space that is 100% mine is my bedroom, just as it was when I was growing up in my parents' house.  I don't know if it's that coming full circle or if it's something else, but the other day I had the urge to rearrange the furniture in my room.  My room is pretty small -- it's the smallest bedroom, but has three large windows and wonderful light -- and is filled to the brim with furniture and objects that are meaningful to me.  I had had all of the furniture set against the walls, the most logical arrangement.  But I thought I'd try something less logical, bringing my bed and desk into the middle of the room and creating nooks and cozy areas.  The only problem with this arrangement is that it's pretty tight,

but as long as the doors of my desk are closed there's enough room to move between the desk and my bed into this cozy spot by the window.

The rotary phone (functioning, but not plugged in because I have no phone jack in my room), was a present from my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and that amazing type-writer came from my father-in-law.  I rescued the rubber plant, abandoned in the weeds beside the cornfield that butts up to our property.  You can see that I still haven't rearranged my arty wall, but I'm in the process of figuring out how I want to do it (and am even creating a new piece to add to it!).

Although I can sit on my husband's Eames rocker (I didn't really steal it, he's letting me look after it for him) and look out the window, I'd like to be able to sit on the footlocker (which used to be my dad's and was my toy box as a child.  It got an orange face-lift when I was in college).  Maybe when it's nicer and the window is open I'll move the typewriter.  My bed is the comfiest spot to sit in the room.  And yes, those were glimpses of the quilt I made this winter draped on its side.

I realized that I never photographed it finished and never the back.  I'll have to do that when I photograph my new quilt top (I finished it yesterday!).  The quilt reflects my overall decorating idea for my room: comfy, colorful and DIY.  I've added a little bit more color with a new plant:

And brought my other flying pigs out from the corner where they were hiding (one's peeking out there).  Now I'm bursting with some DIY sprucing-up project ideas.  I've been wanting to paint my pigs so they're all the same color, an antique-y off-white.  And I just bought some gold paint to paint the frames on two of the paintings in my collection of roses miniatures (all found on ebay).

Another project that I'm working on right now came about out of necessity.  One of the odd things about my new room arrangement is that the first thing you see when you come in my room is now the back of my desk.

It's not very pretty, but I'm working on it.  I'll share my makeover project with you tomorrow as part of Kootoyoo's Creative Space fun.