frugan

I’m sitting in bed with the laptop and Erik, no surprise here, is still asleep next to me. I’m really tempted to wake him up because I want caffeine. Make a cup of tea or coffee, you say. Logical, yes, but what if when he wakes up we decide to go out for breakfast? Then I’ll really want a coffee (maybe two!), only I won’t need it as much and will have tainted my treasured coffee-breakfast experience with a large cup at home. This is the ridiculous way in which I plan, worry and obsess about the tiniest details, usually gastronomic.

But forget about the coffee, I should really let Erik sleep. (Oops, the typing must be louder than I thought, he just popped his head out from the covers.) I should let him rest now and build up some energy for what might turn out to be a wee bit of a stressful morning. Because once we’re up, dressed, fed and caffeinated, we are heading for IKEA.

We need shelves for our newly renovated hallway walls. We have taken away our desk and are officially going “mobile” – no office nook, just a laptop. Instead we’re turning our old office area into a cozy entrance with bookshelves and a chair of some sort. We’ve stripped the walls of their ugly strukturtapet (textured wallpaper) and have readied them with plaster and paint. Today’s tasks are shelves from IKEA and then relieving our groaning bookshelves of a little bit of their load. 

We’ve already picked out the shelves so that shouldn’t be too stressful. It’s the other part of our IKEA trip that might prove trying. I am determined to re-think our lighting. I have just spent two days on a fantastic workshop about furnishing with light. We learned about the properties of different bulbs, how to work with pools of light, and what to think about when lighting a room. We made light installations, makeshift lamp shades to experiment with light diffusion, and we had to create the right combination of light for certain activities (watching TV, working, eating). For our final “exam” we were split into teams and put into fully furnished rooms without any light and had two hours to light the room. Our team got the living room, which was harder than I expected. I worked for the better part of an hour trying to figure out which mood light would best illuminate a dark corner, only to decide at the final bell to leave the corner in shadow.

I received my light education diploma with pride and am happy to announce that I am now fully equipped to cause chaos in my own apartment and look with scorn on yours! So I will head to IKEA with my new knowledge and try to convince Erik that what we really need, what we have to have and if we don’t I just don’t know what will happen to us, is a directed light near the TV. And what is likely to occur is that I will become dizzy in the various pools of light in the store, my judgement will start to suffer, and I will kick myself for not being able to remember which bulb was best at reproducing a certain color. Thank God for the 5 SEK pizza slices on the way out!