My Fortress of Solitude

Well, I actually did get my study cleaned this afternoon. This consisted mostly of sorting out the various papers scattered around into two stacks: Stuff I Need To Keep and Stuff I Can Pitch. But at least you can see the coffee table again, which is great progress.

I call this room a study, but it is really more of a slightly dandified junkshop. We redid our basement two years ago and I simply walled off the section back around behind the furnace and put in french doors. The ceiling had to accomodate a good deal of plumbing and heater/A/C piping, so rather than being flat all the way across, it contains several sections of dips like inverted Lego blocks. (In order to make this more interesting, I put a lot of trim around these sections.) We didn't bother carpeting the floor, as we did in the main part of the basement. Rather, I just put a big rug down over the fake-brick vinyl floor covering that sits on top of the concrete. As for furniture, the room is full of the cast-offs from the rest of the house -two old sofas, a glass coffee table, the desk and bookshelves I bought when we first got married, and a big drafting table on which I'm building a wooden model of a Baltimore Clipper.

The Butcher's Wife doesn't like this room. She says it reminds her too much of the crazy-assed apartment I lived in during law school. (It was one of three in an old converted house. The floor sagged so badly that if you moved the furniture around the wrong way you literally could make yourself sea-sick looking at it.) She also thinks my decoration (a jumble of prints, nautical charts, posters and knick-knacks collected over the years) looks too post-graduate as well.

Meh. I suppose she's right, but I don't really care at this point. My stereo is down there, where I can play it as loud as I want without having to worry about waking anyone up at night. Also, the room has two windows that look out under the back porch. So I can close the door and smoke a cigar in there in peace if I so choose. Last spring I knocked a ceiling vent through to the main duct of the house, so now the room is warm in winter and cool in summer. It looks very eclectic, but it's comfy and private. At the moment, this is good enough for me.

Once that Ed McMahon million dollar thing works out, we plan to add on to the house. The kitchen, which sits directly over my study and is on the second floor above the ground, will probably be the first target of remodelling. When we finally push it out, we'll go ahead and add a real room downstairs as well. At that point, I'll start to worry a little more about respectibility.