The Nesting Continues....

One of those things that is closely associated with responsibility and growing up is owning furniture. Oh furniture, the atlas' burden of all old people! Why can't we get by without you?

No, I've never been much of a furniture man. I did rather enjoy making myself a loft bed so I could maximize the interior space of my room when I was single. That was more the charm of optimization and doing it yourself that really appealed to me.

Since marrying, though, I've taken quite a shine to the art of home improvement. As in, improving your home with caulk, bubble wrap, styrofoam, and other possibly less orthodox materials. It's all in the name of optimization, I sometimes like to say.

For me, utility has always trumped looks as I kept all my belongings in those plastic bins and the multitude of bookcases I have scattered around my house. Well, getting married changed some of that. I got a real dresser (inherited it, actually, from a friend who was leaving town) and a real bed. But since marrying we have eaten dinner at our computers because we didn't have a real kitchen table. And I was fine with that. Why get a great big stupid table that you would only sit at for a little while, and where would we put it anyway?

Enter IKEA...
Can I just say that IKEA is a furniture store that even the most masculine of men could love. It's two parts brains, one part portability, and one part economy. You can't beat that. This table was a total impulse buy (something about going to a domestic type store when we have a baby about to pop out seems like a recipe for impulse buys) and it has changed our lives. You don't really have a home until you have a dining room table. And it fits so nicely in our dining area! (Plus it was a lot of fun to put together.)

This picture prominently features the plastic cover we put over it. One thing I didn't take into account was the fact that this table and chairs (unlike the floor model) have not been varnished. We'll have to do that ourselves, but not until things get a little warmer here and we can work outside, or at least open a window. In the mean time, we are going to trim this plastic to fit and tape it underneath. We even got placemats.

We actually went to IKEA for these



That is, the matching dressers (so cheap!). The one, as you can see, will function as a changing table and diaper station (are those two separate things?) and the other will hold all of Kendra's clothes and stuff.

And you can see that I put my big monitor and old computer on the tall dresser. You may recall that we recently bought Ashley a new computer and me a monitor to match hers (22 inches). We upgraded our home network to gigabit ethernet and put the old computer and giant monitor on this dresser. Why put the biggest monitor there, you ask? Look at the view from our elliptical machine


Oh yes. You can stream netflix or lost from online, watch a DVD, or copy a ripped dvd from one of the other computers (so fast over the upgraded network!) and watch it while you work out!

We had a DVD player and TV in this room, but we never used it (finally sold it on criagslist, along with our beloved but unused PS2). The truth is that the streaming internet and copied DVD's are much more common things to watch while working out than DVD's, and this monitor is better and larger than the TV was. Ashley watches the shows she likes but I don't (like Jerico and the more recent seasons of Lost) while she works out in the morning. In principle I work out on it when I get home from work. We'll see how well that works out.

But even if I don't use it, Ashley uses it every day and that's a good use of an old computer and a monitor I otherwise would have sold for peanuts on ebay. (Can you believe that you could have a monitor that is large enough that it's uncomfortable to use as a desktop monitor? Well you can. It's 24 inches diagonally.)

I'm not sure if Kendra will fully appreciate these amenities, but I think I am learning to. It's kind of nice transforming this one-time bachelor pad to a real grown up home.

Now we just add a baby. And Ashley's working hard on that.