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Wednesday, February 17, 1999 By Samantha Bennett
I finally went out and bought a real filing cabinet. A metal one, with two drawers. I have now been an adult long enough to have accumulated important papers, and I need to put them somewhere other than in a box under my desk.
So there I am at Office Depot, looking at filing cabinets and their price tags, and I am weighing not only price and quality, but also whether each filing cabinet would fit with my decor. After about a half-minute, I forget the filing cabinets so that I can weigh why I am even applying the word "decor" to the collection of objects in my apartment.
For a long time, I lived in dormitory rooms, and this was my first real experience with decorating. My university supplied each student with a desk and chair, a dresser, a wall-mounted linen cabinet thing and a bunk bed, which encouraged but fell far short of guaranteeing a monastic devotion to study. All of these items were, it goes without saying, extremely ugly.
I arrived freshman year without much of anything to add to this sterile environment; I didn't have any idea what I would need. I blame my parents, partly because neither of them ever lived in a dormitory, and partly because it is easy and fashionable. My roommates and I found ourselves without furnishings and with little money. We bought a heavily used couch that was as unattractive as it was uncomfortable. A couple of us decided to solve our social isolation and bare-walls problems in one masterstroke by hanging our undergarments in the living room.
No, I am not kidding.
Well, come on, it's not as if there was a lot of Martha Stewartesque inspiration all around us. (This was, I wince to admit, before Martha Stewart became a household pest.) The rooms around us were decorated with arty posters, sure, but there were also a lot of milk crates and cinder blocks. You had your purloined street sign, your bedsheets passing as curtains, your threadbare armchair (color: mustard yellow? taupe? moss? pus?) that you just knew had never seen the inside of a decent home in its whole unfortunate existence, your giant spool "table," your leaf-challenged ficus tree. The guys with the most impressive room, a real showplace with a first-floor window on the courtyard, had hit upon the brilliant design theme of building a beeramid of drained Bud cans on the mantel that cleverly picked up the patriotic colors of the Interstate 95 sign on the wall. Genius.
My junior year, the first IKEA opened in America. This was a watershed that paved the way for inexpensive yet charming and quirky furnishings everywhere and virtually guaranteed that no dorm room ever again had to be without an Allen wrench. My parents got me an unfinished pine chair and love seat, bed linens and a little rug. Thanks to the economic climate of the late '80s and early '90s, I still had them eight years, a degree, four apartments and as many jobs later.
Even though I have now been in the same apartment for nearly three years - yes, and it only took me two of those to commit to hanging things on the walls with nails - I still acquire most furniture through a process of sitting on the floor surrounded by two dozen fluted wooden pegs, scattered wrong-size screwdrivers and a sheet of directions in German.
I have become so good at home-assembly furniture that girlfriends call upon me to help them. They know that even if we get something on backward and have to undo a few steps, I will not make fun of them the way a guy would. I will merely squint at the instructions in my practiced way, take a swig of Diet Coke, pull the splinter out from under my thumbnail and start prying those pegs out of the particleboard. Plus, I have Philips screwdrivers.
Do I have decor? I don't know. I have some furniture I like and some I can live with. I have rugs. I have throw pillows. I have some framed things on my walls that I'm very fond of, and they were positioned with a measuring tape and a pencil.
And the next time I move, I know what to do if the landlord doesn't like nail holes. You can go out and buy Spackle, but Colgate toothpaste works pretty well too. I learned that in college.
Samantha Bennett can be reached by e-mail at sbennett@post-gazette.com.
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