When I first moved into this shitty place in 1999 (ughhhh), I was obsessed with the third floor attic space. There is a stairwell that’s accessed from Chooch’s closet, so it’s like a legit third floor and not some creepy crawl space with exposed Pink Panther insulation, no requirement of climbing up on a shaky pull-down ceiling ladder.
I had big plans for this space!!
A music room. A general hang-out space. For a hot minute, it was going to be the bedroom of an ex-friend who I now hate with the fiery passion of every star in the universe and am so glad that plan ended up fizzling out before any actual “moving-in” activities had commenced.
Then Henry moved in and with him came a bunch of shit that wound up finding a “temporary” home in the attic. Then it basically just became a catch-all for “things we don’t have room for but might want to keep.”
For 20 years.
I don’t know how much longer we will be living here but I wanted Chooch to have a nice little space of his own to entertain friends / have game nights / etc. while he’s still in high school. We attempted this twice over the last two years, and actually started to make a small dent in the STUFF last January and then hit a wall, got side-tracked, lost interest, who knows. But I have been CHOP CHOPing Henry over the last several weeks. Two weekends ago, we made several trips to Goodwill to drop stuff off, and we threw out A TON of shit. There is still some stuff (not much) that we have pushed into a pile in the middle of the room while we figure out what to do with it, but enough has been cleared out for painting to officially commence!
First, Henry to patch a bunch of areas of the walls though because evidently, there had been a leak at some point?! There is a small section of a narrow wall that had a pretty good chunk of plaster fall off and while I was watching Henry patching it, I slowly said, “OK I have an idea—NO, HEAR ME OUT…” because he gets so clenched every time I hit him with talk of an idea.
“What if we just cover that wall with…..FAUX FUR?!”
I waited for him to reject this idea.
But then I could tell he was considering it.
“OK fine,” he said.
YESSSS.
It is just a very small portion of the room, like a sliver of a wall. I have seen people do entire rooms in faux fur and that is too much even for me, if you can believe that I have limits. But I’m sorry, I’m not vacuuming the walls of an entire room. Who has time for that!?!?
As of now, we have some of the blue walls done. Purple is going on the others. We might have checkerboard action on a wall.
I don’t know. But I do know that we have a disco ball.
I didn’t know this old ass chair of mine still existed!! It’s one of the things that came with me on all of my moves since leaving my parents’ house. I fucking love this chair, even though it’s bent and probably shouldn’t be sat upon and also rusted in one spot. I told Chooch it can stay in the forthcoming game room as part of the aesthetic and he was like, “MMmm, cool” because he hates any reminder of the fact that I have been places he has not, lolololololololol.
Forever in competition with my own kid.
I’m sad that I forgot about this chair and didn’t buy stickers in Korea and Japan. Is it cheating if I buy some online right now?
OMG I didn’t know this still existed either – my “House Rules” sign from my very first and most beloved apartment at Payne Hill. Yes, it was necessary to make “no jumping off balcony” a rule. That apartment, man. The parties. Jesus.
I’m excited about this – this is the staircase going….straight into Chooch’s closet (which is annoying because he needs that space to remain a closet so just ignore the clothes) but the part of the wall/ceiling straight ahead is going to be striped with the three colors of the room (teal, purple, yellow) and then a neon sign which I just bought from Yellowpop will hang there.
I also got this little, cheap neon from Amazon because it’s cute and no other reason is ever needed.
Ahh, as I’m writing this, the Yellowpop neon sign was just delivered!
I will follow-up with pictures of that once that part of the room is fluffed and ready.
It’s nice to have something to design again! I love it – it keeps my mind busy and happy.