Chapter 7.Redecorating For Under 650,000 Dollars

The best way to get decorating ideas is to buy several glossy interior design publications such as Architectural Digest (“The International Magazine of Homes Much Nicer Than Yours”) and cull through the articles to obtain useful tips. The main tip you will pick up is that if you want your house to look really nice, you do not necessarily have to have professional training or even a special “flair” for design; all you need is more money than the human mind can comprehend. You will learn this from eight-page color photo spreads featuring homes the size of Baltimore—always called “villas”—situated on dramatic mountain-side real estate accessible to ordinary citizens such as yourself only by telescope. The accompanying articles sound like this:

The owners—he, a prominent industrialist neurosurgeon and president of four major investment firms: she, a bestselling novelist and Queen of Belgium—knew exactly what they wanted when they decided to build the Villa de Mucho Simoleons. “We wanted,” they said, in unison, “the kind of informal and inviting home where we could entertain our friends and, if we felt like it, play polo in the foyer.”

Their design consultants, Wilmington A. “Bill” Sashweight IV and Marjory “Pookie” Westinghouse-Armature, sought to create a “fun” motif by decorating the ceilings in the master bath with frescoes done originally for the Sistine Chapel by Michel “Michelangelo” Angelo and importing a working Hawaiian volcano to heat the pool, which was originally a lake in Switzerland. For the owners’ two children (originally the children of a Nobel prize-winning physicist and a world-renowned ballet dancer), who sleep in their own wing, (originally Versailles), the designers chose ...

And so on. After you have read a few articles like this, you should have plenty of nifty ideas for the kind of furniture you want, although of course, given your price range, you will have to buy it at a store with a name like Big Stu’s Discount House of Taste, where the dinette sets are made from compressed oatmeal.

Besides money, the other thing you need is time. Nobody has ever come up with a good explanation as to why this is, but it takes longer to obtain a piece of furniture than to construct a suspension bridge. My theory is that furniture is not actually built by human beings, but rather is grown, probably in some intensely humid Third World nation where they have giant furniture trees that can take years to produce a single ottoman. When you place your order for, let’s say, a teal love seat, the order is mailed via boat to a furniture plantation, where a worker, who speaks little English, frowns at it, wipes the sweat from his brow, straps on his machete, and walks into the jungle. He halts briefly as a ripe armoire thuds into the earth ahead of him, then he continues along the narrow path, squinting upward into the dense mass of vegetation overhead. He spots a dark shape far above him in the gloom; it could be a love seat in the early stages of formation. Or it could be a coffee table, or a Barcalounger, or a gorilla nest. “Who knows?” the worker thinks to himself “And what the hell is ‘teal’?”

So we’re talking about a slow and inexact process, with one piece arriving years after another, which is why most people go through their entire lives without having all their furniture look nice at the same time. My advice is, order your furniture now, even if you don’t even own a house yet, even if you are in fact an unborn child, because if you are lucky, the last piece will arrive just in time for your great-great-grandchildren to spill Zoo-Roni on it. Not that you will care: you will hate it anyway. This is because of

NEWTON’S FIRST LAW OF FURNITURE BUYING:

The amount you will hate a given piece of furniture is equal to its cost multiplied by the length of time, in months, it takes to arrive.

I recall the time my wife, Beth, finally got fed up with the brown sofa we had for many years, which looked like a buffalo that had staggered into our living room and died from a horrible skin disease. So she decided, the hell with our son’s college education, she was going to get a new sectional sofa. She took many measurements, then she went to many, many furniture stores, then she ordered the sofa, then we waited through several presidential administrations for it to arrive. And finally it did, and it was exactly what she had ordered, and so naturally it made her almost physically ill to look at it. I told her it looked fine to me, but it was no use. When she was looking at this sofa, she was looking at Jabba the Hutt. She would lie awake in bed at night, thinking about this thing squatting out there in her living room, and it was only a matter of time before she went insane and attacked it with a steak knife. So I was very relieved when she decided to sell it through a classified ad, which was a pretty interesting experience in itself because of the call she got from the sex maniac. This is the truth. First he asked her a bunch of questions about the sofa, which he seemed sincerely interested in, and then, lowering his voice about two octaves, he said:

“Are you wearing loafers?”

Beth failed to notice anything particularly unusual about this, which shows how crazed a person can become when she is desperate to get rid of a sectional sofa.

“Yes,” she said. “Now, the sofa ...”

“Are they brown?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But about the ...”

“Do they smell bad?” he asked.

At this point Beth, even in her furniture-induced derangement, realized that this person was not a Hot Prospect, and she got off the phone. Eventually she sold the sofa, so it wasn’t such a bad experience after all, though it probably would have been easier and more relaxing if we had just gone out into the backyard and set fire to a small pile of hundred-dollar bills.

Of course there is a way to obtain nice furniture without the frustration and high cost of buying it new, provided you are willing to put in a few hours of honest “elbow grease” and possibly suffer permanent disfigurement. I am referring, of course, to the time-honored Thrifty Homeowner art of ...

Refinishing Furniture

No doubt you have at one time or another visited the home of people who have a number of nice older wooden pieces, and you have said something complimentary, and your hosts said something like: “Oh, thank you, we bought them all for a total of $147.50 at garage sales and refinished them ourselves in the garage and now they are worth, we conservatively estimate, nine million dollars.” They are lying, of course. They stole all this stuff from the Museum of Nice Old Wood Furniture. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that at some point you will get the notion that you can have nice furniture via the refinishing method, so you might as well know the correct procedure:

1. You go to a garage sale and you find a bureau covered with hideously ugly orange paint.

2. You call your spouse over, and you say, in a quiet voice so the garage sale person can’t overhear you: “Look at this! You know what this is, under this paint? This is (CHOOSE ONE): ... solid oak!” solid bird’s-eye maple!” ... solid walnut!” ... solid oaken maple eye of walnut!” (It makes no difference what fine hardwood you claim the bureau is made of, because it will forever remain an elusive dream that you never actually lay eyes on, similar to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.)

3. Your spouse, shocked, whispers: “Whoever would be so foolish as to cover up such beautiful wood with paint!? With a minimum of effort, this could be

a lovely piece!”

4. Feeling like thieves in the night, you pay twenty-five dollars for the bureau and scuttle off with it. You do not hear the cynical laughter of the former owner.