December 13 What’s the best change you made to the place you live?

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I have a love/hate relationship with my room. I love being in my room, surrounded by books and cards and pictures. I hate that I have a diagonal wall, and it’s hit or miss whether a nail will go through or just force the unknown materials to crumble to the ground. It makes decorating and positioning things difficult. So for the first, oh, nine months that I lived in the place, I just didn’t try. My walls were empty. It was a little depressing.

After I saw a blog post with a new spin on the clothesline concept, I bought some thin wire and more clothespins than I knew what to do with and hung cards and photos on one wall. Better in theory, because my cards weighed the wire down, and the clothespins wouldn’t stand up straight and looked freakishly large compared to the cards. So I abandoned that idea and returned to the Jacky Carter decorating staple: cork board squares, which I use to tack up notes, post cards, autographs (Hello, Hillary Clinton), hand drawn comics, photos, prints, cards…

But before I left to travel this fall, I took down everything on my walls and packed up everything in my room to store in my closest (which is in the living room…that’s how crazy New York is! As if the diagonal wall wasn’t enough) while another girl sublet my room. It was a pain, but coming back from such a life-changing trip felt like the perfect time to rethink how I wanted to decorate my room.

The big change I made, which really isn’t that big at all, was to take all the clutter and crap and toiletries off my dresser and put them in the top drawer instead. I downsized my pj collection to make room and put my socks in a basket. Now the top of my dresser is clean. I can’t tell you what a refreshing feeling that is — to have space and openness after two and a half years of make up mess.

Then I rearranged the contents of my bookshelf, transporting three small piles of books to my dresser and propping a “Keep Calm and Carry On” print on top of the books. Dudes. It was like “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” came in and Ty Pennington screamed “Moooooooove…thaaaaaat…buuuuuuussssss!” That’s the happiness I felt by that tiny little change. Which I think was more indicative of a shift in thinking and perspective after my trip. Of looking at the same stuff in my life, but just in a different way. I’ve managed to let some papers and a tad of clutter come back to the top of the dresser, but my “Keep Calm” reminder stays on top, so that’s just what I do…carry on.