Now the fun part begins…..

I mean it!  Even though we are busier than ever with packing and tossing and moving and all the nuts and bolts of those things, now is the time when we can really get down to the fun of planning the decor of our new home.

It helps that we are moving into a tiny rental space.  There’s no time for us to regret shedding most of our furniture — we’ll be seeing pretty much how we will be living, so sentimentality will get put out on the curb along with those IKEA chairs.

Although most of the choices can be made at different times during the build process — we won’t need the sectional for the upstairs sitting area until we are ready to move in — we will need to decide on a number of options soon because we have to design how to get power to the lights we want.

For instance, we know we want the sputnik lamp above the bed

(maybe with fewer arms)

so we’ll have the box wired into the ceiling to accommodate that.

Now for beside the bed — we want lighting beside the bed for night-time reading.  Mounted on the wall?  Or sitting on the bedside table? Mounted, since the tables are already very small.  Maybe a pendant?  No, we want a lamp with an arm so we can direct the light onto our books and away from our fellow sleeper’s faces.  We know where the bed will go — but how high will it be? How big will our headboard be?  We’ll need to place everything correctly.

We need storage under the bed, and because the bed will be placed so close to the side walls there won’t be room to pull out under-bed drawers, that means a lift-a-bed

Luckily they have a local distributor. So when we pick a bed, we will have a good idea how high the mattress will be in relation to the lamps, and we will know how wide the headboard should be, so we’ll be able to talk with the designer to get the boxes for the lamps put in just the right place.

And this is before we even break ground on the new place!

But doing this homework ahead of time and making clear decisions means no CHANGE ORDERS!  Change orders are just what they sound like, a way of taking your estimate and blowing it up (literally and figuratively).  Heaven forfend you change your mind on something after the trades are off-site!

And all the time we are picking the nitty and the gritty of the design, we are trying to keep to the big picture.  Or rather, the small picture. Because we are trying to make the inside of our home look bigger than the outside.

Like this guy did:

And that’s going to influence all our decisions.