Get a Move On

When Christine was a teenager, and it was just the two of us in our townhouse, one of our favorite forms of entertainment was rearranging the furniture.  We both loved how it gave us something to do, and we could give a room a whole new look without buying anything new.

Doug, however, does not view furniture rearranging as a hobby.  Like a lot of men, he is chilled by the idea of coming home and finding his chair in a new place--or, even worse, his bed pointed in a new direction.

But as it turns out, the two houses that he and I share--our little Sears kit house in Newark and our even tinier beach shack--don't lend themselves to large-scale rearranging. We're lucky to fit in the furniture we have, and in most cases it can fit only one way.

So I've had to turn to nano-scale rearranging to keep my habit going and keep Doug calm.

Rearranging stuff goes hand in hand with serious cleaning.  You know, you take everything off the mantel to give it its semi-annual dusting, and then you decide you might as well change things up.  And of course, since our house is so small and we have such a serious junk habit, we have a basement full of things just waiting to be cycled back into the display circuit.

So yesterday, while Doug was helping his stepson install a ceiling fan, I battled dust and moved stuff.

Here is the refreshed mantel:

We have built-in shelving in our kitchen, so I moved some things around here:

And I unearthed this cute collection of syrup dispensers hiding behind a cabinet door (the large one is actually a Tang pitcher from the 1970s).  Now they actually look like...a collection.

I played around with the top of this cabinet and filled the Lance jar with dog biscuits for Jodie:

I even switched some photos around from one wall to another.  I moved Doug's grandparents' marriage certificate, which was hanging on the wall in our extra bedroom, into our room, replacing a collage of his family photos.

He just shook his head last night when I told him that switching things around is good because after awhile you stop "seeing" your things if they're always arranged the same way in the same place.

Then when we went to bed, I pointed out that I had moved the marriage certificate into our room.

"Oh, what was there before?" he asked.

Busted.