Urgent Need For Reader Input

Friday 6/16 Revised update 6/19: I ordered the full bed. The bedroom is big enough to support a foot board – the mattress isn’t here yet (or even selected) and I may have to go with something less kitchy than my sentimental vintage orchid lamp but here it is:

The package(s) came sooner than expected and it weighs a ton. the quality of the finish is wonderful – I’m really pleased with it. Also, remember when I said you can see into the master bedroom as you come up the main hallway from the front door to the family room? Well, the foot board is kind of showcased in the door frame, so Whole Shebang was the right call here. Now everyone who passes by can admire it, not just me.

Wednesday update Polling Results: the Whole Shebangers outnumbered the Headboard Only crown by 2-1. So I just bought the Whole Shebang, to be delivered by the end of the week.

Now I guess I should go out and buy that mattress.

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Here’s a list of posts I have started:

• how the top of my head is going to blow off if the pool contractor doesn’t get his rear in gear
• a new Chelsea Cooks! post called “Meemaw’s Xanax Smoothie (Also good for little Abie’s bottle) “, but you’d have to understand Hillary’s mental breakdown AND the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to get that
• a rare serious post about national security
• buying roadside shrimp , which is a big thing in this neck of the woods. Here’s my favorite late night tv ad about it. 

But instead, I have a design question that I need your input on. When we moved to the new house, I brought my 75 year old bedroom furniture with me except for the headboard. I fully intended to buy something new as soon as we got here but that didn’t happen. Finally I found a complimentary bed/headboard that I am really excited about but I can’t decide if I should get just the headboard, or the whole shebang: headboard, footboard, side rails and slats.

Isn’t it snazzy? My heart wants the whole shebang because It’s more of A THING but my head knows that the headboard alone will be easier to live with , crashed toe-wise and will make the bed-making easier. The 4 people in my family that I consulted are split 50-50 and so I turn to you to help me decide.

What would you do? Headboard alone or full set up? (I expect a yuge participation level here , even from the silent lurkers. I need your help!)

12 noon – MIDDAY UPDATE  The voting is running in favor of the whole shebang. (8 to 3)

This bed is available at many online sites under different names. Here’s one that allows magnification so you can ooh and ahh at the mottled tortoiseshell-like finish and the ornate gold connectors*.  The best deal I found so far is at Overstock.com. Throw in a 10% off coupon and that brings the price down to $365.07 with free shipping and no tax. You almost HAVE TO BUY IT for that price.

*I forgot to remind you that I am now in my Eva Gabor**  period of life (except without the diamonds and Merv Griffin) and this styling completely suits that.

** Without question the best Gabor.

Two Things About TV

1. Downton Abbey subtitled “Lady Mary … ugh”. There are not many episodes left for Downton Abbey and although I watch faithfully, frankly I’ve grown bored with most of the characters. I hope when this thing is over, somebody spins off “The Lady Edith Show” where every episode shows Edith happy and accomplished and reading a letter about the latest snit inhabited by her sister the bitch Lady Mary. It will give viewers the opportunity to reaffirm over and over again that no one really cares about the bitch lady.

2. I always knew that my smart tv was smarter than I am. This is the tv that Sami got me for Christmas. It’s in our bedroom so it hears our juicy pillow talk , things like  “How the hell do I get Netflix on this thing?” Or “No I didn’t – did YOU read the manual?”

Wish Me Luck

I’m headed down the Parkway this morning to see the floor lamp of the Craigslist seller who stood me up before. Not the pageant lamp – the other more sedate one.

Which means I got up early had one cup of coffee and then showered and got otherwise ready according to an external schedule, not my usual pajamas all day and wash your hair whenever you feel like it routine. This is a real drag. How do you people do it?

I do not have the feeling that I am going to come home with this lamp. With one spectacular exception,  I’m conditioned to expect failure when it comes to buying used lamps.

UPDATE:

It needs a brighter light bulb and maybe a Swarovski snowflake hanging from the swing arm but here it is. Now I’m all set to fall asleep in this chair when I read. This is my Craigslist corner: nightstand, club chair and floor lamp all gently used and tasked with a second life in my lac,y rose-y bedroom. Which by the way, my children laugh at for its tackiness.

Also, I guess I do have a little pageant in me after all:

This has been an exhausting experience. I’m glad it’s over with.

Bedroom Lamp, Volume 2 No.1

So now that I have the big cushy reading chair in my bedroom, I realized that my old  little Target lamp set too low on a side table is insufficient lighting to read by. I set out to get a plain ordinary 5 ft tall-ish  antique brass floor lamp and instead I got hypnotized by a glittering crystal and shiny brass extravaganza that I found on Craigslist.

You can’t really see it here but the stem of the floor lamp is also  made of crystal.

I’m not really the type for this sort of flashy thing. I had another contender that I was mulling over,  the style of which can best be described as one notch above strictly utilitarian.  But I ran the two options by my husband, my son and my two BFFs and they were all greatly in favor of this one. I still wasn’t fully convinced but I did a little googling around and guess what?

The phone number in the ad came up as the contact number on a pageant site. I don’t want to say it right out in case the seller understands googling but the pageant title rhymes with Mrs. Blue Furzy.

And now it all makes sense! This is the floor lamp of a pageant winner! This might have even been one of the prizes, forgotten in the excitement over other prizes like free teeth whitening, crystal encrusted photo albums and a personalized magnetic car sign. Can’t you just see her standing under the spotlights, beams shooting out from her Swarovski crystal crown,  her clutching her bouquet of American Beauties in one hand and a  glittering crystal and shiny brass extravaganza  of a floor lamp in the other?

Now I want it. I want it bad.

So after a few misfires like missed phone connections and weather delays, today was the day that I finally got to go see it. It was in a self-storage place 40 miles from me in the town where the Hindenburg exploded. I lost sleep worrying about actually getting down there because of the fresh snow and the single digit temperatures this morning, but I was highly motivated to sit under a crystal-embellished floor lamp that was possibly associated with a feeder pageant for a national title.

I got up early, fixed my self up complete with full face makeup and minced out on the thin layer of crunching snow left behind by yesterday’s shoveling and blowing activities and safely made it to my car. I made sure I had plenty of gas, that there was sufficient wiper fluid and that there was no junk in the cargo space. I even flattened the second seat and put a container for the lamps shade in the back. Even though the price was listed a “$50 or best reasonable offer”, I knew before I even saw it that there would be no quibbling and I’d be coming home with Mrs. Blue Furzy’s floor lamp.

But the guy stood me up.

Sad face!

In fairness, he did leave me a voice mail canceling our appointment which didn’t appear on my phone until hours later but that didn’t change the fact that I was parked on the wrong side of a locked gate and I wouldn’t even be laying eyes on the lamp, let alone bring it home.

I halfheartedly agreed to try it again Monday night after work but I don’t know. I’m feeling very deflated about it all now. Maybe the universe is trying to stop me from making a style mistake. Maybe I’m not really the pageant lamp type after all.

The Good The Bad And the Waiting To Be Beautiful

The Good: Sami went to the door warehouse on Thursday to inspect the third front door and we did accept it. It does have sunken nail holes but not as bad as the last one and only on the  inside which I hope really is the inside this time  but it didn’t have any paint blisters or other finish imperfections. I can train myself to overlook the sink holes on the inside and from the outside if we are to be judged by the integrity of our door, it will look like we are first quality people. which is where my interest lies.

The door gets installed Tuesday, along with the window and garage door trims. Which are made of plastic. And I’m worried that they will be brittle from the cold air and crack at the first application of the drill. It’s always something.

❤ ❤ ❤

The Bad: Oy, the lampshade saga. I have spared you the deliberations I conducted about how to properly adorn my prized Modern Orchid table lamp – cut to the chase: I selected a Fancy Oval Bell Silk Shantung Lamp Shade With Round Cut Corners. This is perfect, don’t you see, because the wide panel on the front of the shade matches the wide panel on the front of the lamp and the round cut corners match the shape of the lamp base. Also the oval shape means that the shade will have a thinner profile in the front and won’t be likely to overlap the boundaries of the small nightstand it will be placed on.

But when the shade got here, it wasn’t oval at all – it was round. I know – right!? The vendor was very good and refunded all of my money and sent a pre-paid packing slip so back it went.  I flirted for a while with a round shade that had a scalloped bottom but one fine day I came across a Fancy RECTANGULAR  Bell Silk Shantung Lamp Shade With Round Cut Corners. This one was even better because the bottom dimensions were 17″ across the side and 12″ front to back. I searched for the best price and got a really sweet deal at Hayneedle. The last one in stock, apparently.

* sigh *

It was delivered this week and this morning, I started to cut away the protective plastic from the shade and the first panel that was revealed had a big glue blob partly on the panel and partly on the bottom trim. Big as in a ^3/4″ drip. I cut  away to reveal on more panel and this one had small drips of glue in the middle of the panel. I cannot live with this because it is on the side of the shade that faces the bed and I would see it every morning when I opened my eyes.

I don’t even know anymore.

I am getting very good at asking for refunds/refusing to pay for  bad merchandise so there’s going to be a discussion with Hayneedle on Monday morning.

Now I don’t even know anymore. Maybe I should go with the scallops? I don’t even know anymore.

The Waiting To Be Beautiful: Everything else is waiting to be beautiful. I can hardly wait to bust out my cobbled-together Nativity set. The set was a $10 bargain of main figures only  that made by a German toy company and so I was able to supplement animals from their farm series. The one thing I could never find from that company, though, was a suitable representation of the Gloria angel. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Gloria angel has fallen out of contemporary favor and only exists now in very expensive sets or very large sets suitable  for church display. 

I’ve always avoided the Fontanini Nativities because they are so 1. bombastic and 2. Italian countryside-ish. I’m glad that my life mate has as much passion for a Nativity scene as I do, but since he insists on geographical accuracy, I’ve long ago grown tired of defending the Dickensian Christmas images and got rid of the snow-covered bottlebrush pine trees. I am not about to place myself in a position where I’d have to defend  Bethlehem villagers carrying around clusters of grapes, shepherds bonking the sheep or  the too-obvious pride that went into sculpting the Roman centurions.

But I admit defeat about Gloria so I turned to eBay to look for a properly scaled Fontanini angel for the small nativity display that is so dear to me. eBay has revealed to me an Italian company that looks like they do Fontanini-ish  knock-offs , which means smaller prices and greater availability. And it was from that source that I found a this sweet little 2 ^1/2″  Gloria.

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The size and coloring is perfect and it has a proper hanging hole on the back, which not all of the Fontaninis do. And guess what else I found? Palm trees! That ought to make a certain Mideastern someone happy.

Not just palms – date palms!