Nathan's column: Looking live in, little by little

Talk about it

The newspaper business being what it is, it’s hard to know whether I’ll spend the rest of my professional life working in journalism. There are too many variables. For all I know, Facebook will launch a daily newscast next month made up of nothing but photos of babies, food and kittens. It will no doubt be a hit. National policy will be based on kitten sneezes.

Actually, forget I mentioned that. I have a business plan to write up.

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t work for a newspaper, but I feel confident I will never find work as an interior designer.

Based on the evidence of my own home, my advice to most clients would be, “Are you sure you don’t want to just leave that the way it is?”

Consider: I have lived in my house going on five years and have painted exactly two rooms. I have a can of paint ready for a third. I have had it since the first year I owned the house. It remains unopened.

For most of the time I have lived in this house, I had three large photographs hanging on my living room walls, one by Ansel Adams and two bike-racing photos by Graham Watson. Their placement was chosen based primarily on the fact they were already framed and there were already holes in the walls in those particular locations. Most of my walls have remained bare. I have a collection of posters stashed in various locations around the house waiting for frames. I’m sure I’ll get to those once I get that last room painted.

I’m trying to change. A few weeks ago, I bought four cheap ottomans from Target and turned them into a coffee table I don’t mind putting my feet on. I bought a bed frame, quite possibly the first I have had since I had bunk beds. I even got it put together within a month of its purchase.

I’m not stopping there, either. Over the weekend, I replaced the biking photos in my living room with two more Ansel Adams photos, contributions I got thanks to a change at my father’s office. Fortunately, the new photos also look good on the existing hooks.

I even relocated the biking photos to a different wall the same day. I hung two more hand-me-down photos in my bedroom. By a stroke of luck, they were already in frames that matched my new bed.

On Sunday, spurred by some urge I still don’t quite understand, I went to four stores to find a suitable filing cabinet for the tiny room I use as an office. It’s part of a bold move to transform the room’s floor from a paper storage area to, you know, a viable floor.

It’s all still a work in progress, I’ll admit. There are still more bare walls than decorated walls. The filing cabinet remains largely unfilled. And the less said about the room where I keep my bike gear, the better.

There is movement forward, though. Give it another five or 10 years, and it might actually look like someone has lived in the house for six months.

I might even have that other room painted.

Tags: opinion, rosemount, commentaries