Living in a matchbox

My partner Jae and I have lived in a LOT of different places. Mostly due to my work, we’ve moved around quite a bit.

We met in Chicago where I had grown up and returned after college and where he had moved from a small southern town in search of life in the big city.

One of the things that I have always appreciated – being the control freak that I am – is that he has always left the design aspect of our apartments to me. He will tell me if he’s intensely against a choice that I run by him but after twenty-seven years he’s decided that our tastes are similar and it will all work out in the end.

We have had quite a range of apartments too. Our first was what I like to call our “one room deficiency” apartment. It was a small studio in Chicago and for one person it would have been…um…charming. We all know what charming really means…small. Now imagine this scenario – I was having problems with my roommate at the time and we had a large two bedroom apartment where I owned most of the furniture. Things came to a head and it was getting dangerous to stay (don’t ask) and Jae and I hadn’t had time to look for a place of our own as yet.

So, we got a bunch of friends together with a truck and while Roommate From Hell was at work one day we all descended on the apartment and virtually cleaned it out. MAN, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when RFH got home that evening!

The studio was Jae’s and we moved EVERYthing in there except the dining room which we “lent” to a friend. This included an antique bedroom suite, my grandmother’s wing chairs and about two dozen boxes not to mention artwork (remember Mom was a painter), clothes and about a billion chotchkas (this was before I learned what kind of freedom paring down can bring.

Ever the resourceful decorator, I spent a goodly amount of time stacking all the boxes up to the ceiling and covering them with neutral fabric and then hanging art on them. There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of room but, it shore was purty!

We soon had found a great (big) apartment of our own and in the years we lived there it was always in a state of flux.

One Christmas Jae’s mom was coming to visit so I took that opportunity to put all the antique furniture in the small second bedroom and create the “Laura Ashley Living Memorial Bedroom” for her time with us.

When I got bored with the layout – a classic Chicago shotgun apartment – I took an afternoon while Jae was at work to move the dining room furniture into that second bedroom and all the four six foot tall bookcases out of the second front sitting area, sitting on the floor and pushing those heavy things down the hall to the dining room to make us a den! Imagine his surprise when my partner walked into the living room and threw his briefcase down where the chair “was supposed to be”!