In My Room | A Nurse Decorates
I had two pieces of furniture delivered yesterday: a really nice lingerie chest and a basic nightstand. They joined two pretty little tile stands that I bought for bedside use a few weeks ago.
I did not buy the basic nightstand to use at the bedside; I bought it to put under my internet router. Don’t ask me why, but in my new house the internet router is hooked up from about a foot above the bedroom floor in the middle of one of the walls. I had to do something to get that router off the floor; you know how nurses are about clutter on the floor.
The little nightstand is perfect for the job. It has just enough top surface to hold the router. It doesn’t stick out enough from the wall to get in the way of walking through the bedroom and to the bathroom, and I don’t have to tell you how nurses are about ANYTHING obstructing the path to the bathroom. And as if all that weren’t enough, it has a drawer.
The decorative tile tables do not have drawers, so there was just something that made having a real live nightstand with drawers in the room seem…well, right.
My realtor friend Sheila came over to see my new furniture. She admired my pretty little tile tables. She thought they were unique and different. She thought the nightstand was boring. “It has a drawer,” I pointed out. “Not to mention a shelf. And it only sticks out from the wall by twelve inches, so it won’t block the path to the bathroom.”
“It sure won’t”, said Sheila, noting the path and its full thirty-six inches of clearance. “And what is this fetish you have for little tables with drawers in them? Your new living room tables have drawers too.”
“And they have shelves with recessed spaces for glasses”, I pointed out proudly. “Always good to have a safe place to rest a glass of water.”
“You must think you’re decorating a hospital room,” Sheila said. I denied the allegation, but wondered to myself if she wasn’t right.
Sheila then proceeded to admire my new lingerie chest. She thought that a pretty little rug in front of it would look really nice. I pointed out to her that if I put a rug there, it would be right under my feet as I got out of bed every morning. “On that polished wood floor,” I told her, “my trajectory on that rug would put my forehead right at the corner of the regency bench under the window in no time flat.”
That’s when I stopped wondering if Sheila was right. I knew she was.
