Spring Cleaning

Okay, this is less about cleaning, and more about renewing one's take on one's surroundings. In other words: time to rearrange the furniture!

I have to be honest and give credit to my husband, who made a push for rearranging our living room. At a friend's recommendation, and armed with some extra money from some side work, he recently went and bought us a flat screen TV and Apple TV.

I feel like it's worth noting here that before now, this was our TV:

It's analog, and we don't have cable. So, TV time (which I don't often find, as I'm on the computer too much) is limited to XBox Netflix streaming or DVDs.

I think that buying Apple TV and a larger, higher quality display opened up worlds for the husband and kicked him into inspired mode.




We live on the top floor of an old house, so we have interesting ceilings/gables. It gives us a couple really cute alcoves, which we really haven't taken advantage of. Until now (thanks husband!). He had wanted to lift our futon chair to be level with our radiator, which meant we needed to lift the frame about a foot or so off the ground. Just this week, he had brought home free shelves from his work to help me redeem the mess that is my craft room. These shelves aren't pretty, but they are deep and heavy duty plastic. And they're the perfect size to be the mount for a futon chair frame. (Not to mention that they just gave us additional storage space in a closet space deficient apartment.)

The result

It should be said that I absolutely love alcoves. I would have fantasies in middle school of having just such an alcove in which to read all day and hide from the world. Teeny Ass Apartment agrees with me: alcoves rock!

Because our old TV was so heavy and big (it's like a foot and a half deep), we had a coffee table to hold it. With the flat screen TV, we were able to mount it on the wall, giving us back a coffee table. Yay! We needed a place to put all the tech-mo-logical apparati though, so we did an IKEA run, and got one of these:

It's nice and basic, and does the job. Except the back panel complicates the wiring issue with all of these boxes that plug into the wall and tv (Apple TV, XBox, DVD player, speakers). We took out the paneling, but the visual result was, well, horrendous. I didn't take a picture, but trust me on this. Or look at the back of your TV, and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Once again, husband has a clear idea of what he's looking for: Japanese print backing to the shelf. This time, I get to be the inspired one and actually make use of my slightly ridiculous stash of craft supplies. Using a simple Japanesque print wrapping paper, we were able to panel the back of each shelf. Not only is it inexpensive, it also is a lot easier to cut holes into a piece of paper to account for random wires popping out of an upright XBox.

I feel like there is a great DIY tutorial in this technique, but I really don't think I need to tell you how to do it. You cut out paper you like, and adhere/pin it to the back of each shelf, giving a nice space for the wires to exit the back. Do you really need pictures? So, instead of telling you what you likely already know, let's call it a DIY inspiration!