Spaces, like species, evolve slowly

My desk has been disappointing for a while. This doesn’t have to be the case.

It doesn’t fit in my room, but roomie TC and I have no need for a dining room, so we turned that space into an office/guest room. So it currently houses my desk and her desk and the extra bed. And very little else except clutter, at present.

So I decided to try to do something to bring beauty and character to the space because it looked like this:

Just depressing to look at, isn’t it? It made me feel powerless in the face of inertia. I get enough of that in the rest of my life: my apartment will not yield to entropy. So the first step was just to get all the crap off it:

Then I decided that Marvin could live there, as a weird little inspirational sprite:

Now… what? Now the creative part has to happen. And it has to happen for cheap.

One thing I have in my possession already is a roll of black contact paper. Which means I can create a removable vinyl sticker, so long as it’s not bigger than two feet in one dimension. So I’m considering, since I can’t afford another pharmacy lamp (having blown my budget on my bedroom), I could create a silhouette of one. That’s a thing the cool kids are doing now.

But I also need to bring my signature aesthetic to this space. Given that the desk is modern and white, and the wall is “neutrals-mean-universally-appealing-to-realtors” beige, and the room has a gigantic (and lovely, don’t get me wrong) modern high-rise window across one entire wall, flooding the room with sunlight, there are some challenges to doing the thing I do.

I need to consider my assets: a big bin full of fabric, albeit not more than about three yards of anything. Enough to make at least a little bit of curtain, maybe? And maybe do some low-rent upholstery (I have a staple gun, nothing can stop me now) on the desk. I can also probably spring for some more contact paper, so I could put a pretty metallic, like a steely silver, on the little white metal IKEA drawers. And possibly the desk legs? Oh, I could also paint the chair, give it a little flavor.

Oh, here’s a weird thought for the good folks of IKEA Hackers — would it be possible to just replace the legs altogether? like with pieces of wood? So long as they have that one screw in the base, I wouldn’t think there’d be anything else special about the IKEA table legs. Hmm. A trip to the salvage yard and/or hardware store may be in my near future.