Ikea Dreams

Oh, it was lovely to get to sleep until I woke up this morning instead of waking to an alarm, especially since I ended up reading a book in one sitting and didn't get to sleep until late. And really especially since I had a rather disturbing dream about some of the people I would have seen at church, and I had to mentally rewrite the dream to be more like something that would really happen in order to get past some of the unease related to it. That entailed a lot of lying around, semi-awake, instead of hopping out of bed the moment the alarm went off.

Just as lovely was the fact that there was good sleeping weather, as it was nice and cool this morning. In fact, I had thought about eating breakfast on the patio, but it was a bit too chilly. I think it would have been pleasant if I'd been dressed instead of in my nightshirt and had put on a sweater, but I wasn't in the mood to get dressed before breakfast. Let us pause to ponder the magnitude of this: I would have needed a sweater to sit outside in Texas in August.

Aside from being done with music and art camp, yesterday's big excitement was the arrival of the Ikea catalog. I don't know why that gets me so excited. I've never been in an Ikea store and have never bought anything there. It's not even really my style, since I'm more into the Victorian look with dark wood (my house looks like a Bombay Company showroom). But still, this catalog is to me now what the Sears Christmas Wish Book was to me when I was a kid. I just like flipping through the pages and daydreaming about being all organized and having nifty places to put everything. Then I realized something: one cool thing about the rooms they show in this catalog is that they look like the way people live, not like "catalog" rooms. In the bedrooms, the beds are always unmade, which makes them look inviting. You just want to crawl under the covers and snuggle. When they show bookcases full of books, they're not neatly arranged by color or height. They're piled in every which way, sometimes with books placed horizontally across the top of shelved books. Their bookcases look like my bookcases. Then there are usually books piled up on end tables and coffee tables. It's a rather brilliant psychological sales ploy because it makes their dream home seem attainable. You don't look at the pristine catalog layouts and think "Yeah, that'll never happen." The beds are unmade, books and papers are piled everywhere, and it still looks lovely, so you think you could make your house look like that if you just bought that stuff.

However, it wouldn't do much for me because of that not having walls issue. Going vertically and using your walls to store and organize stuff is a great idea, but doesn't work so well in mostly open-plan houses with few interior walls and exterior walls that are mostly windows.

I may add an Ikea voyage to my list of things to do this fall, just out of curiosity. I do have one underutilized wall in my office and one in my bedroom. I could fit more books in the office and maybe a wardrobe in the bedroom. But I want to redo the flooring in both rooms, so adding furniture is probably not the best plan for the moment.