Window Treatments Saved My Life!

“Curtains are baffling,” I told my friend Abby one day last summer. “I mean, the living room needed something in the red family to tie in the kitchen chair and bedroom rug, right? But I tried this weird sage color and—bam!—it’s perfect!”

She turned to me. “You sound like a woman.”

“I can’t help it,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’m obsessed. I’m rearranging furniture in my sleep, then waking up in the middle of the night and doing it for real.” Abby agreed, but it was clear from her smile that my newfound obsession with home decorating wasn’t all bad, either. It meant I was moving past a dark period of my life: my divorce.

I was 33 years old when my marriage fell apart. I decided, in my separation haze, to move into the same house—with the same roommate, Joe—I’d moved out of 7 years earlier. I was back in the same bedroom, sleeping on the same frameless mattress, surrounded by the same thrift-store furniture.

I stared at the bare white walls for 2 months. Then one day, a thought darted through my mind: Nothing changes if nothing changes. I must have picked up the phrase somewhere and logged it. Suddenly, it made sense.

I’d spent my entire life occupying other people’s spaces. My parents’ house. My college dorm. The myriad apartments I’d lived in after college. The apartment my wife and I had rented. I’d always considered myself too much of a free spirit to lay down roots. That was bullshit. I was just afraid to commit—to anything or anyone or any place.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. It was time to make some major changes.

A month later I moved into a sunny one-bedroom in a charming Spanish-style building. The move took an hour: Everything I owned fit in the back of my Jeep Cherokee. It was still early that Saturday morning when I found myself alone for the first time in my nearly empty apartment, my footsteps echoing, my anxiety swelling. I was vaguely aware of what a sensible adult would do. He’d make a list of all the things you find in a comfortable, functional, fashionable apartment and systematically go about checking off those items, one by one. Chairs, rugs, lamps, tables, pictures, plants . . .

So I did, but my list quickly grew to overwhelming proportions. I was on the verge of ordering two complete pages out of the Pottery Barn catalog when my
cell rang. It was my mom. “Do you need anything?” she asked.“Yeah, everything. I literally need everything.” Her motherly instincts kicked in. “Okay. But what do you need today? If you have something to sit, eat, and sleep on, then you have everything you ­absolutely need today. Do you have those things?”

“No.”

“What don’t you have?”

Okay. I didn’t literally need everything. The guy who lived here before me sold me his sofa—a decent Danish modern rip-off I bought because it didn’t emit any discernible odor. So I did have a place to sit. And while I didn’t have a table, I did have knee-high boxes. They would do the trick in the near term. But I definitely did not have a place to sleep.

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“So a bed is the only thing you need today,” my mom concluded. “Don’t run out and buy a bunch of stuff just so your apartment looks full. Take your time. Figure out what you really like. And when you love something, and only then, buy it.”

I spent the next 2 hours wandering down rows of mattresses—sprawling, bouncing, and generally trying them on for comfort and size. It was fun. For the first time in my life, I was buying something meant for me and no one else. I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in a very long time: optimism. Starting from scratch suddenly wasn’t the bad news, but the good news.

Over the next few months, I canvassed Craigslist, wandered flea markets, and occasionally recruited Abby to accompany me to those absurdly expensive West Hollywood furniture galleries. I quickly developed a sense of what I like. A vision for my home started to crystallize.

On one of these reconnaissance missions, I ran smack-dab into an artifact from my married past—a rustic driftwood coffee table with sharp, modern lines and a dark chocolate finish. My ex and I had owned a nearly identical table. Toward the end of our relationship, we argued about it so often that it became a stand-in for our whole suite of marital problems.

Even though we’d picked out the table together, she grew to hate it. I still loved it, but instead of saying so, fearing she’d judge my taste, I argued against spending money on a new one. In the end, the table left, and so did I. Now, here I was looking at essentially the same table we’d picked up at a no-name furniture store for 500 bucks. The price tag: $2,200. All I could think was . . . I was right! That table is cool!

Seeing that coffee table sent my desire to decorate into overdrive. A few days later, I fell in love with a kitchen table I saw in Elle Decor. It had a sleek, steel-frame base and a natural wood top, and came with matching Alvar Aalto stools. I couldn’t remotely afford it. So, with no background in furniture design, carpentry, or steel fabrication—or in any other field that qualified me to hold a miter saw—I set out to make a DIY knockoff.

I figured I’d need 5 days. Three months later, I had something that bore very little resemblance to the table of my dreams. I had overestimated the height and underestimated the depth. Thinking all woods were created equal, I’d chosen cheap white pine, which made my table look more like a workbench. I’d attempted to save it by applying a coat of polyurethane. Now it looked like everything Ikea sells.

I abandoned the idea of making the stools and bought what, to my desperate eye, were passable Alvar Aalto knockoffs at Target. They were the wrong color. So I stained the tabletop to match, miscalculating by roughly seven shades of brown.

Exasperated, I ripped off the wood top and threw it away. This would have to be an original, not a cover.

I went to a scrap yard and found a perfectly distressed, rustic iron plate. The edges were so sharp, though, that I had it cut to the same dimensions as the table frame.

Finally, I was finished. Before me was an all-iron, too-narrow-to-be-a-dining, too-wide-to-be-a-console table that was cool in an ugly-pretty way but more or less useless. I was so proud. I invited Abby over to inspect my work.

“Where’s that thing supposed to go?” were her first words. This was the decorating equivalent of, “Is that really what you’re wearing tonight?”

“Uh, right there,” I said.

She contemplated for a few moments. Then she walked to my closet and pulled out two antique folding chairs I’d picked up at a flea market several months earlier. Abby arranged them around the table, alternating them with the Target stools. We both stepped back.

It . . . worked. The ensemble was oddball but didn’t look at all accidental. In fact, I liked it better than the table-and-chairs set I’d seen in Elle Decor. The amazing thing was, all the pieces were under my nose the whole time. Maybe decorating wasn’t so difficult after all.

That was a year ago. Today, I still have plenty of work to do. My apartment still has many sparsely decorated corners and a lot of blank walls. And then there’s the little matter of the nearly empty space I call my bedroom. I’m going to take a little more time with that one.

The good news is that I’m no longer afraid to make choices—or mistakes. Perfection isn’t my goal; not anymore. This is my home, and it’s always going to be a work in progress. Just like me