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Furniture

All Acting Regiment

14:54 / 12.10.05

What kind of furniture do you have in your house? How important is it to you? What do you want more of?

I've got a meta lchair, a soft chair, a bed, a cupboard, computer desk...and that's it. In my entire digs. Then again, they are small.

Fire away!

15:49 / 12.10.05

Me and Xoc both have a penchant for ethnic tat ie. stuff that reminds us of good times on holidays abroad. We've various carpets, fabrics and smaller bits and pieces lugged back from India or Thailand or Cambodia, but we've never quite had the resources, when we're over there, to buy the bigger items we both really like - sooo, we (or, more correctly, I) end up impulse-buying similar stuff, particularly from eBay.

The flat's late Victorian, and if y'had to dignify our 'style' with a term, I suppose (Cheapo) Victorian Oriental(ish) would describe much of our furniture. Bokhara rugs, leather-topped pedestal desk, carved mahogany or rosewood, little brass-topped Moroccan tables (definitely want more of those), Indian wood screens covering the bedroom windows. Big plants (I consider them furniture) and elephants everywhere: Xoc used to collect elephants and, after visiting India, we began collecting Ganeshes too. The occasional Buddha. I like second-hand stuff, particularly old Indian or Chinese brass/copper planters.

Favourite bit of furniture at the moment is probably the big leather-headboarded bed. It was a major indulgence (especially the mattress) but makes for the most comfortable night's sleep ever.

What would I like more of? We definitely need more stuff to sit on (more than two guests, and we end up sitting on the floor), and we're limbering up to a really good dining table. Having just got into gardening and plants, I could always do with more conservatory greenery in nice big pots.

We've always been crap at minimalism.

15:52 / 12.10.05

The only bit of furniture I care about is my bed. I've accumulated a lot of other tat over the years but can take it or leave it. My bed is robust. My bed is the most comfortable bed in the history of beds. I've had it for about 4 years and if I've been away for any amount of time and then I come back to sleep in my bed it really is like coming home.

Ahhh. bed. yummy.

15:54 / 12.10.05

I'd settle for handles to open the wardrobe doors with.

And it's not ethnic tat. It's judiciously chosen, yet commendably inexpensive, exotica.

16:21 / 12.10.05

I don't have much deliberately chosen furniture, being a young'un with second-hand crap and having the bf's and roommate's stuff too. But I do what I can to create a deliberate look out of what we've got by careful placement, paint colors, window dressing, etc. I think we've got kind of a clean Scandinavian thing going, with cool colors, expanses of blond wood, and textured or patterned fabrics.

The big sore spot, sadly, is our bedroom. It's too cluttered but I don't really know what I can take out of there to make it better. We have two dressers (male) both covered in junk, a chest that holds my painting clothes (with radio atop), TV stand, dog crate, small bookshelf that serves as another junk-collector, a plastic set of drawers for my bf's personal toiletries (covered with fabric), a standup clothes hamper to keep the dog away from my dirty undies, and of course what every bedroom needs - the armchair, for holding piles of dirty clothes.

Also, our bed blows. It's too small, for one thing - just a double. And it's one of those cheap pine jobs from a "college furniture" store - the damned thing actually has sharp nail-ends sticking out of it. I would also really love a headboard, for optimum reading in bed action.

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

19:17 / 12.10.05

A bed and my obscenly expensive ergonomic chair, that's all I need. The bloody chair's worth more than I am, I swear to god. It goes up and down, the arms swivel and go up and down, the chair tilts (you can CONTROL the tilt) AND...its got this mesh stuff that gives perfect support for your ass.

If God made a chair, this would be it!

I survived one summer with a futon in a too-small bedframe, this chair, a desk, a bookshelf, a fridge, and a dresser.

Aside from the chair, my most important furniture is bookshelves (as judging by the fact that most of the ones have home have three rows of books on them).

...my bed's not too bad either. Its HARD to find matresses longer than 6 feet.

19:47 / 12.10.05

About ten years ago I was working in a building with lots of little offices and one day I delivered the post to a man in a tiny little room, filled to bursting with a desk and a very big chrome and leather chair.

"I like your chair" I said.
"Have it" he said.
"Really?" I said. "Do you not want it?"
"No" he said. Give me a tenner for it. It takes up too much space.

Later, when I took it to be mended because the leather was broken on the arm I found out it's an original Wassily chair.

It's mine and it only cost me a tenner.

20:01 / 12.10.05

I want one. Are you sure it's not just taking up too much space in your place now, Olulabelle?

20:10 / 12.10.05

I think that it's important to have an indoor toilet.

It's a terminal nightmare, having to head off out there, petticoats swaying in the cold, bitter breeze

20:40 / 12.10.05

Oh stop whining, old woman. Get a chamber pot under the bed and there would be njo need to brave the elements. Or learn to pee standing up and then you have tons of options.

21:35 / 12.10.05

At the age of 75, young man, it seems to me that I should be on the 'giving' end of some of this thing we call 'life's' more complicated lessons, and not the 'receiving' one.

Well I should be, shouldn't I?

I just feel that it's all a bit bad.

And there's absolutely no way I'm writing this from what the tabloids might amuse themselves to think of as 'a padded cell,' either.

Damnit.

22:43 / 12.10.05

my bed is the best bed ever, IMHO. The best bed for me, that is. It's a double, and I think of it as huge, because I'm usually the only person sleeping in it, and I'm a rather small person. Well, I sleep in it with a lot of dolls. There are only 12 of them up there right now, but I've had as many as about 35 in my bed at one time. There are railings around all the sides, so the dolls never ever fall out. I used to have a major problem with dolls falling out of bed in the middle of the night. I don't like waking up with no dolls in my bed, and I don't want my dolls to have to expirience falling out of bed and then sleeping on the floor until I retrieve them. The railings don't go part way across, but completely around the perimeter. It's wonderful. It has railings because it's so high off the ground. It's the top part of a bunkbed, but there is no bottom part. It's as high as the top part of a bunkbed should be, but I have storage space underneath it. I have 2 dressers under there, and a Martha Stewart portable closet, and some crates full of stuff, and a table, and there's still more space under there. I live in a rather small space, so it's really wonderful to have a bed that basically doesn't take up any space. The primary room of my house (the other two rooms are a bathroom and a kitchen) is shaped such that the bed fits perfectly into that weird area over there, leaving me with an almost rectangular living room area. I have sheets hanging around the underneath part of the bed so that people don't see all my bedroom furniture. There's a ceiling light right next to the bed that's controlled by a pull chain, so that I can reach over and turn the light on and off while I'm in bed (which would be hard to arrange if it weren't already there) and the ceiling light has a plug! so I can plug in my computer up there if I'm using it in bed. It's made of wood, and it cost more than all the rest of the furniture in the house combined (I usually buy stuff second hand). My bed is TEH BOMB!!!1!!

22:54 / 12.10.05

I have sheets hanging around the underneath part of the bed so that people don't see all my bedroom furniture

you might think that's strange, by the way, but it totally fits in with the rest of the house, according to my warped brain. I have blankets on all the windows, to keep the light out because I have to sleep during the day, and I would have blankets hanging underneath the bed, but I have a limited number of blankets, and I don't need to keep light from getting to my furniture. If I had 4 more blankets, I'd put them over the 3 windows and the doorway (the doorway to the kitchen doesn't have a door) so that even less light would get in. I have extra blankets, but I need those for guests. I personally sleep in a sleeping bag on the bed all year round. I don't know if you can imagine sleeping in a zero degree sleeping bag during the day in July when it's 100 degrees out....I've done it.

22:57 / 12.10.05

Ooh, I hope this isn't threadrottish, but I had a bad experience with a loft bed like yours, fuckbaked. I used to have small apt and had my bed up with furniture beneath, just as you described. It was a first floor apt with bars on the windows, except the one under my bed - the bars had been ripped off by firemen (long story). One night while I was reading in bed with the window open, I heard some guy stumbling around outside my window, slurring "BOB? BOB? Hey Bob!" and suddenly my screen came crashing in. I froze in terror. I couldn't yell back and let him know there was a girl in the apt, and I couldn't get down because my ladder was directly in line of sight w the window, and I couldn't escape. Lucky for me, the guy stumbled off in search of Bob. But the vulnerability of being stuck 5.5 feet in the air like that was so scary, I never slept in the loft bed again.

08:14 / 13.10.05

As long as he wasn't 4ft tall and speaking backwards smack you were fine.

08:22 / 13.10.05

I'm in a rented furnished flat so I have had no input into the furniture. It's all your basic ikea stuff, so it's hard to get excited about it. My least favourite is the dining table, as it's some kind of metal patio style thing, and is frankly rubbish. The chairs that go with it are almost as bad. The sofas are probably my favourite item, as they're big, leather & comfy.
I'd quite like an unfurnished flat, as it would allow me to use all my furniture, specifically the big leather lounge chair that I rescued. It no longer tilts and I repaired it using duct tape, but it still rocks.

09:28 / 13.10.05

I have a black, padded leather, uni-frame chair that my I inherited from my dad's office (and he "inherited" from his, I think). The back and bottom are starting to expose their foamy insides now but that just adds to the worn-in goodness.

I really need to "inherit" one of the Xeron chairs that I'm sitting on, though. Mm. Tilty.

As it is, my room also consists of a hand-made corner desk unit that ended up covered in graffiti in the space of a week filled with tubs to store all my art crap. It's the best (ie, organised) desk set-up that I've had so far.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:30 / 13.10.05

'Lula: Oh! I saw one of those chairs recently. Actually I sat in one of them. It was in a University admin building of all places; they had them in black leather and they looked fabulously kinky.

Madman in the ruins.

09:55 / 13.10.05

Apart from my Bed, which i've had for about 10 years now and I replace the matress every three or four years (with a £300 silentnight double matress). The rest of the furniture in my flat has been made or scrounged, including a very comfortable Blue Leather sofa. I made a huge bookcase out of a set of bunk beds and a pair of cabinets made from old MFI drawer units. my most prized item of furniture is a old schoolteacers desk, "Aquired" from a local high school.

09:56 / 13.10.05

I'm slowly collecting pieces of furniture I like: a couple of favourites being a large square, beautifully finished sheesham wood chest cum coffee table, and a fantastically 2001ish circular white dining table on a central column that smoothly splays out into a flat disc at the base so that it appears to be growing out from the floor, like a mushroom.

My partner and I have pretty similar tastes in these things, although she doesn’t share my aversion to sets of things that match. For example, with our dining table we have 4 simple, perfectly nice, high-backed, upholstered dining chairs. I want to get rid of them and replace them with 4 individual chairs; she thinks I’m weird.

I also have a bit of a lighting fetish and am always on the look out for nice lamps. My current favourite is a Weeble-like floor-lamp which is unusually tactile and irresistibly kickable.
Like Ganesh, I think of plants as furniture too, and particularly like big, architectural trees and cactuses. Unfortunately I don’t have a car and live out of range of any kind of garden centre, so don’t have anything like as much greenery as I’d like. With more temptation, my sitting room would be a forest of plants and lamps.

pointless & uncalled for

11:28 / 13.10.05

I don't have much in the way of furniture. A double bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and some shelving. All of it is cheap from Ikea and put together myself.

I take a certain pride in constructing my own furniture. Fair enough, this is by no imaginable means a challenging task, but the simple act of puting everything together and it staying together is quite rewarding. It makes me feel self-sufficient, although the reality is that I'd be crap at building something from scratch.

Apart from totems of my own independence I don't really have much attachment to my furniture, except when my fat ass is lying on it at night. Being semi-nomadic in nature I buy furniture with a sense that I'll be leaving it behind when I move on.

Ex

12:08 / 13.10.05

Really interested in the loft beds in this thread - I can't find one big enough for me at the moment, and I also have a habit of getting up without waking up which I suspect would finish me off if I was more than three foot above ground. But they do seem fantastic.

I own:

An old reddish wooden radio case with brass handle (deceased grandfather).

A set of wiggly weird student-project wrought-iron legs with blobs as feet. I found them in a skip, and they magically fit under the wooden radio case, creating a cyborg steampunk mini-tripod.

A singer sewing machine table (deceased grandmother).

A six foot wooden crocodile called Mythyr Tydfil (rescued from a nursery in Wales - the central hinge was just a machine for chopping off kid's fingers).

Although I love these things, I do need some proper furniture. Mainly I need a couple of bookcases - my books are on planks, held up at the ends by other books. Anyone seeing a cheap but decent, load-bearing, slim-line bookcase should PM me for eternal gratitude.

12:22 / 13.10.05

I'm really not all that keen on the furniture in my house. Anything decent came from Mrs. J's old bright and white flat where it looked stunning, but it looks rather out of place in our late Victorian house. That or it is lethal to toddlers and so has gone up to the loft.

One bit of furniture I would love to move into the house but have not worked out how is a judges chair that is gathering dust in a barn at my parents' place. It is Ox blood red and high backed (really high backed, like 6 foot) with a gold embossed crest on it. If anyone happens to find themselves driving a van from south Devon to London some time PM me.

21:23 / 13.10.05

That's pretty scary, ibis. I don't have any bars on any of my windows (no one around here does), and I hope that never happens to me. I should get a weapon to keep up there. I keep a huge, heavy flashlight that I could bash someone over the head with up there, but that's there just in case the power goes out.