The Boudoir

Yesterday I tossed out the word boudoir in my teaser line. Instantly it occurred to me that I didn't know how to spell it and I didn't really know the meaning. Vaguely I knew it referred to a bedroom but after checking my Big Kahuna dictionary it seems that it refers to a ladies bedroom or dressing area. So the term boudoir isn't accurate because a man shares this space with me.

When we were first married the farmer brought two things with him:

1. A healthy appetite for living.
2. His really, really ugly bachelor bedroom set.

It was a hulking affair with multiple layers of trim upon trim, making it impossible to dust. Since there were many more important things to spend our money on, such as raising two children, we deferred getting something new.

Fourteen years ago when we moved into our current house we sent the old bedroom set packing. It was purchased by a used furniture dealer who was thrilled with it's Mediterranean overtones. At this point I acquired my grandmother birds eye maple set which included a dresser with mirror and a lovely dressing table. I purchased a matching low boy dresser and mirror at an estate sale. I was disappointed because it all looked a little tired and out of scale in our larger bedroom space.

After my daughter graduated high school she entered interior design school. You know how it is when people launch into new a field of study, a class or two and suddenly they're experts in the field. Such was the case with the farmer's daughter. She marched in one evening and announced that our bedroom was a feng shui disaster of epic proportions!

"Look at all those mirrors," she exclaimed. "You have three, count them three mirrors, all facing the bed."

"OK.....?" I said quizzically.

"It's like when you point a mirror at the sun. All those mirrors are combining and focusing all the energy on you and dad as you sleep!"

This all sounded very ominous and she assured me that it was only through luck that the farmer and I hadn't divorced or inflicted bodily harm on each other.

But it got worse. There was a bookcase. Feng Shui evil lurking in the corner on my side of the bed. I slept on my right side which meant that I slept facing the bookcase. At this prospect my daughter almost fainted. All the power and information from the books were bombarding me throughout the night. Perhaps this could explain why I didn't feel refreshed in the morning. Who would have thought.

I felt a sense of urgency to correct the situation before swords or butcher knives were drawn. At the advice of my daughter-the-expert I cruised through local furniture stores every day on my lunch hour.

During all the birds eye maple years the room was filled with quilts, blue and white china pieces and skads of perfume bottle and mirrors, those dangerous mirrors. I'd looked longingly at beautiful and stately rice carved four posted beds but the farmer nixed that idea. They were too fussy and too big for him. I continuted my search and found a set I would have never considered in a hundred years. It was dark wood with clean lines, a style I would call "metro modern". The scale was right but wait, we're neither metro nor modern. Never mind, I loved it and so did the farmer. Besides our tastes were leaning towards building a retirement home that reflected a warm, organic contemporary style. And so it came home to live with us.

I have 10,000 artsy photographs on my computer, you'd think I could frame at least one to hang over the bed.




The room is far from finished. The windows scream for "treatment".



I've gotten as far as buying the fabric.

The bookcase has been banished to a corner where it won't cause problems.



The only book directly facing the bed is a leather bound copy of Plato's Republic. Now we wake up each morning feel renewed and incredibly smart. Just the other day the farmer turned to me and said, "The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures excellenty wrought by the hand of Daedalus."

Yeah, I'll move that book.



Ikea's affordable river rocks find a new home in a jar.



I found this at Target. It was intended for the buffet table but it's being used to keep all of the farmer's stuff from scratching the wood.



There's still a minor mirror problem but it's been reduced by two thirds so perhaps we'll only slap each other in the morning instead of drawing knives!

Stay tuned tomorrow when we'll talk about something. Can you tell I'm not thinking ahead. I'm simply going to blame it on bad feng shui.