Jan 19 2022
just like heaven
Why can’t we just have a normal house? – Drew, 1/15/21
Hello from the other side of yet another stupid house DIY project. For the last year, I have wanted to do some kind of wild lighting on the ceiling above the staircase. Originally, I wanted to do a cloud ceiling but then it got super popular on TikTok, so…pass.
Then I was going to try and go the “galaxy illumination” route with one of the thousand of celestial projectors that Instagram is always shoving in my face. I actually bought one even, but it was super terrible and not at all what I wanted.
Then we went to that 27 Club cafe in Cleveland and they had a small corner area decorated for Xmas with iridescent cellophane.
The operative words here are “cafe” and “Christmas” but as you know, my main aesthetic is “instagramable cafe” so this got the interior design school flunkee wheels turning in my head.
(Honestly can you imagine if I had actually become an interior designer? Like who would my clientele be, aside from every cafe in South Korea and like, Lady Gaga.
Actually, this sounds very promising.)
So I told Henry, “Ok this is my vision and it’s what we’re doing so you have no say in the matter. I said we’re doing it and we’re doing it” and the next thing I knew, he had ordered a roll of iridescent cellophane and got to work on the small ceiling space at the top of the steps.
I knew I wanted strips of LEDs under it to provide some sort of illumination, but once he held the cellophane over top of the strip, it just looked really bad.
Immediately I thought back to the OG cloud ceiling idea and wondered what it would look like if we got some of that fluff/stuffing/batting whatever the fuck it is and covered the strips with that in order to mute the lights a bit.
So Henry ran to the store right before the Big Snow Storm started on Saturday and came back with a huge bag of that shit. “They didn’t have anything smaller,” he shrugged.
And it’s a good thing actually because once he started in with the cellophane, I realized that it would actually better if we just covered the whole ceiling with the stuffing first, not just the parts where the LEDs were showing.
LOL YOU CAN SEE HENRY’S UNDEROOS.
While Henry was doing all that, I managed to find 4 tickets stubs from various Cure concerts I’ve attended over the years. Sadly, I don’t have the one from the very first time I saw them, in Canberra, Australia, and this is something that haunts me to this day but I will share it with you:
The whole band, including ROBERT SMITH, signed my ticket that day when I got to meet them before the show. When I came home and went back to work at stupid WEISS MEATS, it was SUGGESTED TO ME that I LAMINATE the ticket to PRESERVE IT.
But instead of PRESERVING IT, it fucking TURNED THE ENTIRE THING BLACK because the ticket wasn’t some plain ol’ Ticketmaster bullshit. It was actually really fancy and had fucking gold foil in it which is what made it burn, I guess, I don’t fucking know. I have a VIVID MEMORY of falling to my knees on my office floor in a very dramatic fashion (even more dramatic than two years later when Henry would call me there to tell me that I wasn’t approved to get a Nissan Altima, but we could get a SENTRA instead – ughhhhh) and cried, “Nooooooo!” And then I had the bright idea to stick the ticket in the freezer, because maybe it just needed “to cool off.” Like it was a fucking Hypercolor t-shirt.
Spoiler alert: that did not work.
Luckily, I have photographs and actual video footage to prove that I met The Cure, which is way better than a signed ticket stub, but still. That ticket stub was so fancy.
Oh well.
I also don’t think I have a physical ticket from when I saw them at Riot Fest in 2014, either.
But it was a true feat that I was able to find these 4 stubs in basically less than an hour. I’m an organized pack rat.
I will forever appreciate (even though he probably doesn’t think I do) that Henry takes me lofty ideas and puts them into fruition. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say, “Oh, I would love to do this or that in my house but my spouse won’t let me” and I do totally understand that if you’re sharing a space with someone, you have to do a lot of compromising so that it’s something you both feel comfortable in. The fact that Henry just rolls with it never fails to amaze me. I mean, unless this is also his secret aesthetic??
Lol.
I have the LEDs set to a slow color fade and it just really alleviates the whole little corridor area up there. And it’s also functional because prior to the LEDs on the ceiling, we had a pink lightbulb in there so it was always super dim and moody and you couldn’t really appreciate all the stuff on the wall but I also knew that going back to a plain white light would ruin the whole vibe.
So now it’s the best of both worlds!
This is my new chill zone to sit after video meetings, where I can just ooze into the chair and stare at the wall or ceiling or floor or MY FUCKING NAVEL IF I WANT TO and just let myself decompress and calm the FUCK down. Breathe, Erin. Just goddamn breathe.
This table is still my favorite.
I think what I like most about where I live is that nearly everything in it is DIY/customized. Literally no one else in the entire world has a table like this!
THE AFOREMENTIONED PINK LIGHTBULB.
I needed filler for this one spot on the wall where the spacing was off between two pictures, so Henry made me this little enamel pin display.
Oh shit, and this damn painting! It’s actually pretty sentimental to me and here’s why:
It was August of 2005. Henry and I were visiting Christina in Cincinnati and I was excited because we were going to King’s Island for the first time ever while we were there. However! There was an eBay auction that I was heavily invested in for a Robert Smith painting. It was literally someone’s art class project, but I loved it and knew that I needed it in my collection. The problem was that was obviously pre-smartphones, so I couldn’t stay abreast of the auction while at King’s Island, and actually wrote a reminder on MY WRIST (which proves how dire this situation was because I can’t stand even lightly grazing my wrist with a feather, let alone writing on it with a pen) to leave the park at a certain time that evening so I could go back to Christina’s and use their computer to hopefully emerge victorious as the highest bidder.
Well, I obviously won! But I remember it being very stressful. And this is also memorable because during that same weekend trip, I noticed that I was suddenly averse to all things sweet and was having mad cravings for condiments. This was when I started to suspect I might be pregnant and SPOILER ALERT, I was! So I always associate this painting with that weekend, which was a very weird weekend, indeed.
Back to the present: now that Henry has found his groove with the cellophane/stuffing combo, he has ordered more supplies so that the cloud ceiling can spread its way along the ceiling above the steps. What a fucking clowntown shitshow this house is, lol!
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