The STUFF Sisters - Furniture

Never Just Chairs

When stripped of their cushions and placed seat to seat, these chairs were a houseboat that could hold all three of us on the coursing river – the Persian rug – as we moved downstream.

Our parents are lovely people and provided us with lovely things when we were children. Comfortable & well-furnished homes. Our own bedrooms. Good public educations. Happy & joyful childhoods.

A divorce rocked my world at the end of high school. My parents made sure that as little of that list changed for us as was possible. At the end of the divvying up, my mother ended up with these chairs that had lived in our large living room for years and years. We decided to take them out of her house and get her new recliner handles but didn’t realize that there are a number of side effects when sitting in a recliner for so long.

This year, in late June, my mother sent my sister Casey and me a short text that said, “Curb?” The resounding answer from both my sister and me was a combination of, “Wait.” “I want to see them,” “We might want them,” and, “Are the back pillows still around?”

They are still at her house awaiting a final decision. Mothers are patient souls.

Continue reading “Never Just Chairs”

Voices In My Head

I clearly heard my grandfather in my head this morning. When I reached over my desk and turned the switch and the click wasn’t the same, I heard him say, “They just don’t make things like they used to.”

Now, honestly, they don’t. My office desk lamp was the current casualty in a line of things that are not made to last as long as I think they should.* It had been a gift to me for high school graduation from one of my mother’s friends. A person nameless to me now. The lamp went with me to a year at Mizzou and did even greater duty providing the decorative impetus for me to outfit my first cubicle with red accents – stapler, incoming and outgoing metal baskets, metal pencil cup, desk lamp. Maybe even a trash can, the underneath of my first desk eluding me from this distance of time.

It was still doing duty at my current desk when the tragedy occurred. This is a great lamp. One hundred watt limit allowing for serious illumination then – when graphic design was key to my employment – and now – when my reading-glass-swaddled eyes need the boost of decent light. A weighted bottom so it can be contorted into any shape or direction. Metal-on-metal tension screws for fixing the direction of the arms and the shade.

My corded friend just recently had an appointment with my husband due to a small popping noise where the bulb met metal. It never smoked or sparked, and he was able to find and fix the problem very soon after begging me to unplug in before it “fried”. His words; pure drama.

Today it didn’t even make the right clicking sound as I turned it on, but I still went looking for another bulb, and, when that wasn’t the problem, I checked that it was plugged in. Little troubleshooting things that are in my electrical skill set.

I did not tear up when unplugging it from the wall, although I was tested by the voice and my sporadic attachment to inanimate objects. Instead, I took a deep breath and walked toward the dumpster. Where I instead gently placed it in the back seat of my parked car on a soft, folded sheet.

Home to my husband, where I promptly received “the look” when my intentions were made apparent. It was placed on the kitchen table – by me – because things in that location have a tendency to be dealt with over the coming weekend.

“Is it too much to ask that things are built to last?” I remember another grandfather saying, most likely over something greater than an inexpensive desk lamp. I can’t really say.

I am praying for a positive outcome from the impending surgery. Thirty years isn’t really so much to ask for from a desk lamp, is it?

My grandfathers wouldn’t think so, I just know it.

* STUFF vacuums. Don’t get me started.

p.s. Tell me you can’t see and feel its jaunty personality from these photos! Pixar Studios has nothing on my sweet little lamp. Heck, it’s older than their first films!

Turquoise Bedroom

I tore this page from the February issue of Spaces magazine. This room is too formal for my lifestyle and taste, but that color. Ohhhhhhh, that saturated color.

I think the turquoise matted framed art is brilliant. And, if you look closely the whole wall is framed in wood and acts like a giant second headboard. Again, brilliant. Because that incredible color would become cloying if the whole room was saturated. To me it is the perfect amount of infused color.

Summer Goes

On this, the last day before Autumn officially begins and my favorite season ends, I wanted to share a blog I wrote in August of 2007. I can still see the evening vividly, and the memories are overpowering.

Enjoy. Here it is.

Sloane

Bohemian Rhapsody

How extravagantly Bohemian eclectic.

I envision myself traveling by ocean liner to buy a huge collection of these pieces and then return home. On the way back “across the pond”, my traveling companions and I will sit in a small grouping of the furniture on the covered deck of the ship which was made by Dumond’s designs. We will smoke, drink, discuss literature, argue about politics, and remarkably discover the meaning of life.

PS…Find this incredible collection online at http://www.squintlimited.com/.

PSS…I couldn’t resist watching this video on youtube before I wrote this blog.

New Digs

The beginning of the school year does not bring on the deep desire to sniff crayons or markers. It does not make me yearn for sweaters and boots. I don’t even want the cooler weather to drop down too soon. Around our house, it simply means Mama’s got the bug to move furniture.

Last year it was the excitement and sadness of converting the young man’s room from a bunk bed setup into a double-twin-bed lounging paradise. We got him some new furniture on this site. It was a day fraught with tears for what seemed like the true end to the “kid” room and therefore childhood. At least that’s what I manifested it into.

This year – two days before the first day of school – the golden child’s desk moved from the kitchen to the room we labeled years ago “the playroom” due to its housing all the games, the toys and the air hockey table. His desk had been in the kitchen since the second grade when he and I started sharing a computer. The computer and he faced the wall so I could easily see the screen from any vantage point in the kitchen. Not on my watch was he going to accidentally dance with porn! No way!

a boy and his desk — The boy and his new desk.

The domino effect of house re-arranging is that it gave me the opportunity to tweak a few more things that needed change. It just stands to reason that, if he and I are no longer sharing a computer and a desk, we should both get new digs. So this boy’s mama moved a desk into her dressing room, and all has been bliss. I am safely nestled into the second floor of the house with a window for taking in Hyde Park vistas and with seashells on the sill for moral support. Right now I’m loving the sleekness of the desk surface, but I know that will change.

My move from the epicenter – our kitchen – is providing me with much-needed clarity for the writing I’ve been yearning to do. I am able to leave the hubbub after dinner and enter a little silence – which I still love to have pierced by my baby boy as he attacks his mountain of homework.

Sloane

Books by Color

I am in desperate need of bookshelves. My daughter and I have stacks of books everywhere. You can’t pass through the house with your arms full because you are guaranteed to fall over a stack of books. (Of course, if you did, you would at least have something to read while you waited for the ambulance.)

I have been searching for bookshelves I like AND can afford. This is the real challenge, since I have very expensive taste. I came across these images of color sorted bookshelves and love them.

I like the objects and CDs…looks like a “real” house – by Hinke

“Wow factor” is off-the-charts – by Chota



Artist Chris Cobb and helpers reshelved all the books in the San Francisco shop Adobe Books according to color for his work “There is Nothing Wrong in this Whole Wide World”. Shop by color? Hmmm.

Maybe I could start by color sorting the piles in my house?

Casey