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I can't take it! I'm just too anal for all of this!

My family is kind of into quick fixes when it comes to home improvement. When my father originally layed out the floorplan for the restoring of our house, he failed to include enough bedrooms for the whole family. He must have either assumed that my sister and I would share a bedroom until I went off to college or that one of us would sleep on the couch. Sharing a room with my sister obviously had its complications and I tried several different room arrangements throughout the years living in this house.

I tried sleeping in the wash room. That wasn't particularly fun what with a washer and dryer making a big racket all the time. I tried sleeping in a spare room downstairs. That was horrible considering that I'm totally paranoid and sleeping on a completely separate floor all alone scares the crap out of me. In my current bedroom situation, my room is actually sort of an alcove that one comes to when you get to the top of the stairs. There is no door, no wall even, for this alcove, so I had to make a sort of stage curtain to make a "wall" between my "room" and the hallway. Although I take some pride in the creativity and attractiveness of this curtain, it is sometimes extremely irritating and it offers little privacy or filtration of light and noise.

Back to the quick fixes thing. My bedroom's wall is not the only thing that my family has tried to fix with fabric. The wall divider separating the living room and dining room, an ingenious (note that ingenious is said with a very strong note of sarcasm) idea that my father came up with, is made up of two book cases facing the dining room table. In order to pretty up the back of the shelves facing the living room, my father bought a bunch of fabric from FWS and hung it up there. It still remains there to this day.

It seems that the whole fixing-with-fabric thing is a continuing tradition in this household. Not wanting to spend the extra money on having doors installed on the entryway to our living room but also wanting to save money on heating, my father decided it would be a good idea to simply hang fabric from the entryway to keep heat in. Hooray! It would be a nice idea if the fabric were not ten feet long and totally hideous. Every time I walked by the staple-hemmed monstrisity hanging on a cheap tension rod, shivers went up my spine. No other member of my family seemed ready to take action, so tonight I decided to.

I excavated my sewing machine from underneath piles of junk and brought it out into the living room. I tried to cut off the uneaven edges of the the fabric as best I could before pinning it down and hemming it. The hemms on the two separate curtains were off in height by about an inch, but I decided that it at least looked better than before. I cut off the fabric at the bottom so it stopped just at the floor. I put some little decorative beads from Pier 1 on it and ta-da! It was complete! It still looked horrible, but at least it wasn't SUPER HORRIBLE.

And of course, this is when my father starts yelling at me. "THIS THING LOOKS LIKE A RETARD SEWED IT! ONE HEM IS FIVE INCHES LONGER THAN THE OTHER ONE! AND YOU CAN'T SEW A HEM ON THE BOTTOM BECAUSE IT'LL BE TOO HIGH OFF THE FLOOR!" I try to tell my father that since heat rises, it wouldn't matter that there is like one inch of space underneath the curtains. "DON'T TRY TO MAKE EXCUSES! I SPENT FOURTY DOLLARS ON THIS FABRIC AND NOW IT'S RUINED! RUINED!"

I really don't think it's that big of a deal. We're taking it down when guests come over anyway. And nobody else in the family knows how to use a sewing machine and my sewing skills are mediocre at best. I think it would have turned out that way no matter how long I put it off. Still, this whole experience is just one more notch on the stick of reasons why I am desperate to GET OUT OF HERE.

December 13, 2005 at 12:24 AM

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