Monday, November 1, 2010

The room i'm not allowed to decorate

Still being a newlywed, the past year has been a whirlwind. Filled with ups and downs, fights and laughter, all the while learning about this thing called marriage. I can say without a doubt, that a marriage is based on compromise.

On August 1st we moved out of the city. Prior, we were living in downtown Charleston in a 2 bedroom apartment, 1 bath and 1 small common room acting as a living room, dining room and kitchen in all. I had lived their for the past 2 years and then Tomas moved in when he moved to Charleston.

We moved into another 2 bedroom apartment, this one with 2 bathrooms (one with a jacuzzi tub !!), high ceilings, a dining room, kitchen, AND living room. We are in love with it. One problem with the old apt was the spare bedroom. It was the room that held everything that didn't belong in the kitchen or our bedroom. Workout equipment, yoga mats, half of my clothes, office stuff, books, suitcases, wedding gifts that didn't fit anywhere else, tools, and just about everything else we owned. Needless to say it was a bit claustrophobic. Tomas hated it. When moving into the new place, Tomas quickly called the second bedroom as "his" office and informed me that all of my random clutter and junk would not be allowed in there, including my yoga mat that took up the entire floor. I quickly reminded him that we were getting a new bed (that's what married people do right, move out of the full size?) and that the second room would be the guest room, plus the office (in which obviously my office stuff will go in too) plus the workout room. He quickly disagreed. For many weeks we debated.

Then one night I went to dinner one of my very good friend's very wise mom. When the topic came up she talked about compromise, and that while we are married we each still need our own "space". She then told me of her friend who doesn't allow her husband any personal space in the house, in which he now has piles of clutter on his side of the bed that no one else is allowed to touch. And this left me thinking. Tomas's side of our bedroom is not going to be filled with random clutter.  So, where were our spaces going to be?

Another cool thing about the new place was the large walk in closet in our master bedroom. I could live in that closet, no joke. Eventually, I suggested the deal that I would get the walk in closet and he would get the spare room, with a few conditions of course:

-The full bed would also go in the spare room, which would also function as a guest room when we had guests.
-Since technically we both needed an office and the guest room was neutral it still couldn't be "his" room.

Around the same time, his sister got him a Playboy duvet cover when we went to Switzerland. In which he had then formed a master plan for the decoration of this room. So we agreed that Tomas would have full say over the decoration and design of this room and it would mostly be his place, while I got full ownership of the walk-in (there's also a big closet in the Playboy room for his clothes and such). Rather than calling it "his" room, we now refer to it as "The Playboy Room". It now has black sheets, black furniture, a mostly black duvet cover with a larger than the computer screen sparkling, gold I <3 [Playboy-bunny-symbol] dead smack in the middle.

Think this :


with a gold bunny like this:





It's lovely. All in the name of compromise. Now, for those pictures of VS Angels that have replaced pictures of me...

1 comment:

  1. That is such a funny post. What a great compromise! For the first 9 years of my marriage we had a one bedroom, one bath small apartment. We had to house the big old teacher's desk in the living room. I swear it took 1/4 of the room. I was happy when we got our 3 bedroom house. One room for the baby, one for the desk and the MB. lol

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