From House To Home

I go in and out of phases of being completely obsessed with furnishing my house. I’ll spend endless hours in furniture shops and online looking for the perfect mirror for the hall or quirky coffee table for the living room only to acquire them, admire my flawless taste for about 10 minutes, get bored, and ultimately decide my taste is dreadful and unload my once-prized items on a sibling or the local thrift shop. Usually, the obsession phase lasts for a few weeks, and then I turn my attention back to obsessing about other things—like whether I left the refrigerator door ajar or locked the front door. Thanks for passing along the OCD, Mom.

Now that my husband and I are about to move for the third time in as many years, I’m back to my old tricks. I lie awake at night, unable to sleep because I’m thinking about all of the existing furniture I’d like to replace with new stuff. Unfortunately for my husband, many of my fantasy giveaways are his (your days are numbered, matching Formica bedroom set). Though I do realize that it’s kind of a dirty trick to sell furniture out from under a deployed soldier.

Although I’ve always been oddly focused on picking the perfect shower curtain (file that one under “need to get out more”), it’s beds and bedroom furniture on my mind now. I plan on demoting the jaunty log bed that I was singularly focused on two years ago to the guest bedroom, replacing it with something in a dramatic four-poster. Considering the Shawn Lovell iron number in the form of four trees (complete with a bird’s nest at the very top) goes for $15,000, I was thinking something a little more modest. A lot more modest—like Ikea modest. Though, I’m not sure how my vertically blessed husband will cotton to sleeping in the company’s signature low-to-the-ground model. In bright yellow, no less. Seems like a particularly dirty trick to replace a deployed soldier’s prized bedroom set with something a 10-year-old girl would turn cartwheels over.

Unfortunately for my husband, however, I am utterly subject to whims, and being left alone with months of uninterrupted time to plot and plan how I want our new house to look doesn’t help his cause. During a recent call from Iraq, he made a request: “Please,“ he said, “don’t make any big furniture decisions until I get home.“ Just wait ‘til he walks through the door and sees the orange side tables from West Elm I’ve chosen to go with the new yellow bed. He’s gonna love it.