We’re back, with another episode of Jake Is Particular About Fonts, So He Must Also Be A Master Of Interior Design (trademark not yet secured).
This one is all about where you go when you’ve built up the idea of one purchase in your head for years… only to realize you need other items. And also fewer items. Funny how that works.
But before we get into some of the interior design choices I’ve made — the before and afters are above, with more updates below — I promised a tale of a life-threatening battle with a couch. Specifically, this couch.
Fuck this couch.
Which is to say, thank you, couch. Thank for your service in being anything but a couch. It served its purpose for me as a nest for bags, laundry, workout equipment and dog treats.
May this couch rot in a landfill and find new life as a home to insects and rodents and therefore be appreciated as a monument to decay, finding utility in new ways. Like the giving tree. But as a dilapidated couch.
So thank you, couch. But it had to fuck off for me to move on.
Literally moving on
The problem, amongst others, with removing this monstrosity — for which I may have expressed more hindsight affection than I actually feel — was that I could not dispose of it myself.
In order to get it removed, I had to schedule a curbside pickup. Curbside pickups are a 10/10 service in which the city picks up bulky items from your house twice a year for free. It saved me from having to get a quote and pay someone $200 to remove it.
But because I wanted the couch out immediately, I scheduled it immediately: for the morning after I called. It just had to be out on the street by 6 a.m.
Great. Just get it out there in the afternoon.
The issue was that my girlfriend was at work all day, and we had bought tickets to see Dune II: Double the Worm at 6 p.m. She gets home from work at around 5. So I have two non-options here if I want her help:
Either I force her to help me stress move this gnarly couch the moment she gets home, after a long day of high-level thinking and commuting, then immediately run out to a movie.
Or, we do it at night, after the movie, around 9:30-10 p.m.
Not happening.
So, it’s on me to get this thing out of my room, through the angled corridor outside of my room, into the garage, and onto the street. Any man who has ever moved anything knows that you eyeball the object and the door it has to fit through for a couple seconds, give yourself a half-convinced frown, and think, “ehh, it’ll fit.” Then you wing it.
The first thing you would naturally do when moving a couch is remove the cushions. Unfortunately for me, the top cushions were… sewn into the couch. An exquisite, bullshit feature which reared its ugly head constantly throughout the moving process.
They snagged on my door after I’d found the only viable angle to slide the couch out of the room. I had to pull them up and away from the door frame while simultaneously pushing the couch with my feet to free it. My reward was one of many crushed fingers.
Throughout this process, it must be noted, I was watching my mom’s new dog, Morty (legal name Mortimer), who was desperate to be next to me. When I talk about the life threatening element of this, I’m talking about Morty sneaking up on me during the move.
He’s a dog with severe anxiety, who cowers when I use The Voice. He curls into a porcupine ball and refuses to move, much like an anti-Big Oil protestor (who have great intentions and hilarious, effective execution).
(As an aside, is there anything more hilariously British than an anti-Big Oil protestor storming the World Snooker Championship, throwing chalky paint around, and the commentator, as if witness to a legitimate, paradigm-altering tragedy, going, “Terrible, terrible scenes here,” as the crowd boos in unison? The only thing better may be a smack barm pea wet, or any Newcastle fan, but those are for another time.)
My point is, Morty is a protestor, and his weapon his emotional warfare. When you try to urge him out of a room, he waits behind you, sobbing, unsure if you’re actually committed to leaving the room with him. Is this a trick? Yes. Yes it is, Morty. G’wan lad.
Once I extricated the Mort and moved the couch into the hallway, there wasn’t a sensible way to turn it. While it would’ve fit directly through the doorway to the garage, there is a fixed set of built-in wood cabinets a couple steps into the garage.
My chosen alternative was to pull the couch into the garage vertically, balancing it on the cabinets so as to completely wedge it in the doorway. In short, it was stuck, and standing up almost straight. I had a legitimate fear it might just live there now.
I feel like I need a visual here. Here’s my attempt using Paintbrush, the off-brand version of MS Paint.
Panic set in rapidly at this juncture. I resorted to kicking the couch to dislodge it. I had to kick enough that I could slip under it and to the other side, turn it sideways, and then flip it. Those sewn-in couch cushions were also the cause of this jam.
Once I got to the other side and crushed my foot under the couch, it was surprisingly easy to flip on its side and land it fully in the garage.
Insert: celebration, flipping off the couch, and yelling, “Fuck yes! Fuck you! Fuck you!” to an inanimate object. Is that deserving of shame? Maybe. But man, does it feel good to curse out a couch that gave you hell.
The funnier part of this story is that I relayed it to my dad a few days before writing this, and he started laughing as hard as I have ever heard him laugh. He could not speak.
Once he caught his breath, he told me he had done the EXACT same thing earlier that week: moving a shitty couch without help, because that’s apparently just what we do. I’m not sure whether that’s reassuring or worrying. I think both.
In any case, I slid that couch out to the street and flipped it off once more for good measure.
Suck it. I won.
The redesign
I feel like I’ve wasted far too much of your time discussing the ordeal with the couch, which I realize is a promise that maybe no one cared about as much as I did.
You’re here for the room redesign. I will refer you to the start of this story for before and after photos of my room, particularly the former.
The redesign began with cleaning.
I removed multiple boxes, reorganizing what was useful and what could be stored elsewhere. There was an unsightly black bin storage area just inside my door that I have transformed into an open air camping supply closet in the garage. The other bins were consolidated and mostly hidden.
A mass of books were assorted, and the window ledge cleaned. Tucker’s food, my clothing hamper and another bin fit surprisingly well under my desk, and reside there now.
I vacuumed the couch debris, plopped down a rug pad (yes, I bought a rug pad. no, I haven’t trimmed it to the right size), then unraveled the rug. I laid on it for the next five minutes while Morty and Tucker demanded to be let in and destroy it with their freshly-muddied paws.
Rug: check.
I should mention that I slid my bed out from the corner before I laid down the rug. While I considered multiple spots for it, the rules of feng shui and general gut feeling suggest you should have your bed against a wall, not a window, and be able to see the door from your bed.
As stated in the 1986 action/fantasy classic Highlander, there can be only one… one spot to move your bed that vaguely adheres to the tenets of feng shui.
That spot was the middle of the wall. It removed the sense of claustrophobia in the corner, providing — get this — the ability exit the bed from either side, and opened the rest of the room. There was suddenly space to the left and right of the bed. The rug was framed as the centerpiece, and the windows facing outside allow a low level of light to come in.
I placed a nightstand to the right, and shifted one of my nicer cabinets to the other side of the bed. The drug storage facility that sat next to the bed was relocated to the closet. I’ve been keeping the top of that cabinet as clean as possible except for some Expo markers.
Once I had the bed and the rug intact, I could add the cozy centerpiece: a dark green fuzzy chair with a low, wide frame to let you sit at an abundance of odd angles. It also came with an ottoman that seems to be sturdy, and fuzzy.
I found a funky side table to pair with it on Facebook Marketplace. It would be excellent except for the aquarium rocks that someone appeared to have plugged a couple cracks with.
Still, it’s usable, and that alteration isn’t that jarring for a table that usually has a book on it. It sits next to the chair, along with a black lamp that fades into the room while warming it up. (And yes, the lampshade is technically upside-down, and yes, that actually makes it work better).
I also picked up a desk that’s not quite high enough to serve as a proper standing desk, and which is operating as a podcast studio, and a roof for Tucker’s bed. That area needs a little bit of work, but it is functional.
It took the place of where my vintage record cabinet was. That record cabinet was relocated next to my record player, taking the place of the wood cabinet on the left of my bed. It means the records are accessible from the record player, and the door isn’t cramped by hitting a large cabinet.
The other additions, and the ones which has decidedly upped the vibe of the room, was the introduction of frames. An Arthur Verocai poster that generally matches the rug went behind the reading chair.
A few of my square record poster from a time when I was gifted a VinylMePlease subscriptions finally found a home. I’m relatively proud of the off-center setup I gave the ones above my bedside table for A Tribe Called Quest, John Prine, and Erykah Badu.
I also picked up some wood record holders, which allow you to show off records as their own art piece. It’s an extremely malleable art feature, which is currently featuring an ambient vibe of Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works 85-92” and DARKSIDE’s “Psychic.”
For now, that is pretty much it. I still have some shuffling to do, and a bit of rethinking with a handful of areas. There are some storage situations that could use upgrading/amending/relocating. I may need a slim bookcase in the dead space to the side of my bed. But the overhaul is mostly complete.
If you have any suggestions, please send them my way. The last edition of this will be less about practical room alterations, and more vibe based. What we choose to surround ourselves with, and the value of the little knick knacks we collect in our weird lives. That’s all for now.