“Everyone needs to have their own space in which to be themselves.”
— Emily Osment
Space is a rare commodity in my house. It’s small to begin with, and I am a confirmed clutterbug. I do go through random bursts of organization, organizing shelves, books, and cabinets, but keeping it up is a challenge for me. It looks nice for a while, and then life intrudes. I get lazy on controlling the clutter, and it’s back to looking like a band of hungry raccoons had a frat party in my living room.
Somehow, though, this time seems different, and I’m on a mission to make my downstairs my official “Zone of Happiness.”
Currently, there are too many chairs in my living room. There’s a lovely couch, and I recently acquired throw blankets, pillows, and curtains (oh my!), and redecorated the room in a style that could be called “nautical with a twist of ADHD and a dash of deer in the headlights.” I have a leather recliner, two denim-upholstered club chairs, and a large swivel chair that looks like it came from an episode of “The Jetsons.” It matches nothing, but I love it.
There really isn’t room for all of them, but I’m still going to find a way. The first task was to empty the game shelves of the TV stand and store the games in a plastic bin in the basement. There really is no reason I still need Candyland and Hi Ho Cherry in arm’s reach. Then I’ll relocate the TV to a wall mount, toss the stand, which is falling apart anyway, and there will be room for all my chairs.
Of course, anytime I tackle a room, the “might as wells” set in. I start thinking to myself, “The living room is sorted out? I guess I might as well do the dining room too, and then the kitchen cabinets, and now that I’m figuring it out, I think I want to paint the bathroom and put Snoopy decals on the walls because that’s fun.” My big victory last week was finding a Snoopy bathmat on sale for $15. It’s been $40 for weeks, and if I paid $40 for a bathmat, I’m pretty sure my frugal Irish mother would come right up out of the ground to yell at me for spending too much on a cartoon dog rug.
The living room has too many tchotchkes that some call junk, but I call memories. There’s no rhyme or reason to the placement of anything; it’s a mishmash of photos, preschool artwork, the few pieces of vintage Waterford that I haven’t broken, and one really scary taxidermied squirrel I named Pedro. In the dining room, I have random pictures on the wall, with no theme other than they make me happy when I look at them.
I have dubbed most of this area as my “Zone of Happiness.” I’ve advised my family of the protocols for the Zone, and they know better than to leave anything around that isn’t part of my warped but creatively curated space. There was a large, clunky chest that became a magnet for junk, and someone thought shoving it in a corner would be alright. I moved ruthlessly on that travesty and carried it out of the house like it was a body I needed to hide.
It’s my Zone, almost like a medieval walled city, and there will be no incursions of rabble-rousers leaving their crap around and harshing my mellow. This room was traditionally the center of toys, DVD movies, video games, Lego models, and a leaky, shedding pug. The pug is the only part of that I miss. The kids have grown up, so it’s time for the room to reflect that.
Making a land grab in a family home might seem like I’m a cranky old Boomer, but honestly, I’m not. Everyone needs to have some small part of their environment that showcases who they are. I’m a disaster in the kitchen, I don’t want to sit in my bedroom all day, and while the bathroom is for everyone, no one objected to the Snoopy theme, so that makes it a satellite part of the Zone. For the rest, I’m planting my flag and claiming the living room and dining room as my domain. Stay tuned for what will be an oddly themed cocktail party to celebrate my only slightly hostile takeover and the creation of a Zone of Happiness that will be shared.
