A Real Room

Since moving into this apartment two years ago, our second bedroom had been a catch-all. I'll bet some of you didn't even know we had a second bedroom. We kept the door shut so as not to let the insanity spill out into the rest of the house. And so we weren't completely shamed when company came over. It was pretty bad. If you compared it to a dump, the dump would look nice.

One of my projects this summer was to clean the room out. I took out at least six trash bags full of stuff. Four other bags went to Goodwill. In the process, I found all kinds of surprises. The best surprise I found in the bottom of a random box--several gift cards from our wedding! So this week, Jay and I got to go spend the last of our wedding money.

This is how the room turned out. We bought the chair and large bookshelf with our Ikea gift cards. As you can see, the cat has claimed the chair. It had cat hair on it quite literally moments after I opened the package. A rug and some art on the walls would complete the room nicely.
For the first time since I was very young, I actually have free space on my bookshelves. Can you imagine? I can buy more books and there will be actual spaces for them. With three bookshelves, I now feel confident in calling this room "the library." Or perhaps "the study." I can't decide which one sounds more professor-ish.

We had a couple of random things that didn't have homes that still ended up in the room. You can see the sewing machine here, and there's a corner with Jay's DJ equipment stacked up. But all in all, it looks at least a jillion times better. Plus, with our air mattress, we now have a place for people to stay.