If you look at the photos in my previous post you will see that my house is big and old and beautiful…and empty. So Christmas and the new year I made it my mission to do something I have never done before: buy furniture.

I don’t shop much. I’m a fella™, and as a fella™ I like to walk into a place already pretty much knowing what I will walk out with. Not so, buying furniture. When you buy furniture, apparently you are supposed to take into account the other furniture you own, if any, and how your old stuff will look with your new stuff, and vice versa, in a recursive shopping free-for-all. There are no hard-and-fast rules around the experience, but dammit! All I want is a couple of chairs!

This is how the week went:

On Monday I spent the whole day driving around looking at things. Sofas chairs tables futons desks rugs the whole shebang. I went home that night with one of the worst headaches of my life.

On Tuesday I repeated Monday, but with a more discerning eye.

On Wednesday I went to Art Van and ordered a split queen-sized foundation for my bed, on account of my old box-spring won’t fit up my stairs.

On Thursday I bought a dining-room table from Stone’s Throw, which was delivered Friday morning. Friday afternoon, I hijacked Bock and we headed to the north side of town to pick up my box-springs from the Art Van warehouse. Finally, after a month of sleeping on the floor, or on chopped-up particle-board, I had my bed back in working order.

Or so I thought.

“There you go, have a good ‘un”, said the 20-something fella as he threw my box-spring into Bock’s truck. “Hot dayum!” said I, and “Yee haw. Ummâ…where’s the other half?”

“Says here you ordered one split box spring.”

“That’s right. One box spring, split into two halves.”

“You know, I though it was kind of funny that there was only one. Most people order two.”

“What am I gonna do with half (30″ wide) of a box spring? Put it in the hold of my slave ship? Where’s the rest of it?”

“Let me call 28th Street.”

[time passes]

“They say you ordered one box spring. They can get you the other one, but they won’t give it to you for free.”

“Argh. Okay. When you order A Split Foundation, does that not imply two halves?”

“Well, yeah…” At this point the warehouse floor manager walked over. “What’s up?”

“Hey [manager] guess what? 28th Street is getting dumber again!” (note the “again”).

“Come on; don’t talk bad about our company.”

So the kid relayed the story and ended it with “That’s the most retarded thing I ever heard!”

“Right there with you,” said I, and “Cancel my order. For $500, a box spring had better service me when I lay down on it.”

So I went home, sans box spring. I immediately drove over to the store where I ordered the thing and said “I need to talk to a manager!” A manager came over and I told him the whole story, minus the editorializing of the warehouse crew. He said “Yeah. You ordered the wrong thing.”

“I told you what I needed. YOU ordered the wrong thing. And you only ordered half of it!”

“You said you needed a split foundation.”

“Yeah. A SPLIT foundation! A foundation SPLIT IN HALF.”

“A split foundation is half of a bed.”

“So I should have ordered TWO split foundations? That don’t make NO sense!”

“Sorry sir, if you want to order the RIGHT thing we can get it to you in a week for $300.00.”

“Forget it. Keep your damn bed, I’ll sleep on the bathroom floor.”

So here we are. Today I went out to RCD Direct and picked up what I needed in half an hour, and at half the price Art Van wanted for an inferior product. When I told the RCD fella my story he said “Yeah, if I had a dollar for each time I heard an Art Van story this week I’d have five dollars.”

I think I can safely say I am never doing business with Art Van again.

On the up side, I now have a bed that sits waist-height off the floor, so I can slide out of bed in the morning, rather than climb out of it.

And that’s all I ever wanted.

This is the first round of photos of my house. Enjoy!

My house, which sits on the North side of Innes street. It is hard to tell from the photo, but it sits pretty high up on a small hill. The floor of the basement is about even with the street.

The view west from my porch.

The view east from my porch.

The entryway. I didn’t paint the door.

Facing west into the living room. Note the absolutely beautiful trim and floors.

The dining room. The table came with the house. So did the chairs

The master bedroom. It is hard to get a shot of a large room from small doorway.

The bathroom. There is another one in the basement, which is actually a toilet sitting in a corner of the floor. Huh. Also, the bathroom currently does not have a door. I didn’t even notice until I had been living here for about a week.

Looking toward the south-east from my office.

Looking down on the garage from the north window of the library/second bedroom.

My attic. Those chairs are left over from two owners ago. And so is…

…the Swinging Disco Love Nook! This photo barely does the attic justice. The area around the dormer window has a built-in waterbed frame and its own lights and electric outlets. This photo is from me, laying on my back and shooting up at the ceiling above the waterbed frame.

And this is the view from the attic window, looking down at my car. It is hard to tell from the photo, but I the attic window is close to thirty feet above street level. I have a fantastic view.

So there you have it: The first round of photos. I am almost finished unpacking, and now I need to start Buying Stuff. Like furniture. I will continue to post photos as Chez Winkelman continues to evolve.

Last Friday I bought a house. It is 100 years old, 1800 square feet, with manymanymany new and improved features, thanks to the hard work of the previous owners. I took possession immediately, and spent most of last week moving. I don’t have very many possessions, but I have been terribly busy for months now, so available bandwidth for Stuff Transfer Protocol (STP) has been limited to evenings and weekends. Most everything I own was able to fit in my car, but I have a small car, so what STP bandwidth was available was limited to about 8 cubic feet per hour. You may think that is pretty good, but considering most of my Stuff is in the form of books (over a ton of them), that amounted to many packets sent out. Fortunately the slow line speed (~25mph) was over a distance of only four blocks.

I was able to pick up some extra signal strength in the form of Mr. Bock and his truck, which allowed the transfer of some of my larger files—bed, bookshelves, ego, etc.

Right now I am sitting in my old apartment, taking a break from removing any evidence that I ever lived here. Knowing that I would be moving sometime this year, I let some of the more irritating cleaning projects fall by the wayside, and now I am paying for that lack of attention. Yesterday I spent about an hour chipping old stir-fry from the top of my stove.

A week into it, and I think I have made a good decision. It is a lot of house for one person, but as many homeowner friends (some more than others) have demonstrated, it is not difficult to expand to fill a space.

The address is 629 Innes Street, just around the corner from Martha’s Vineyard and the new Nantucket Bakery. I will post photos in a few days, when I get myself a little more unpacked. If you see lights on, stop on by!

This here page is a hoot. It is the online journal of a fella who spent a couple of years teaching English in to Japanese schoolchildren. Safe for work, unless work has a problem with you howling with laughter in the middle of the day.

Now that class has started and I have no free time, I have gone back to reading books and listening to music. I briefly moved away from reading purely for pleasure and picked up Flash Hacks, a book which contains 100 “tips and tricks” for the serious Flash hacker. The day after that, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling appeared in my Amazon.com gold box, which I took as a sign that I was ABSOLUTELY required to purchase it. I am glad I did, because it is a fantastically interesting and enjoyable book.

In the last couple of weeks I have picked up a couple of novels; the first being Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb, which is every bit as good as her previous books in the Live Ship Traders, Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. And just today I began reading Forty Signs of Rain, an eco-thriller by Kim Stanley Robinson.

But life is not all about reading: In the past few weeks I have picked up three CDs which I have been listening to nonstop: Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years, a best-of collection of the songs of Richard Thompson; Bacchanal/1969, a double-album set of the songs of Gabor Szabo; and Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, a collection of songs performed by Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum band.

This last CD in particular is amazing. Listen to the samples on the amazon.com page. If you hear something and say Where have I heard that before, it is probably “Shimmy She Wobble”, which was played in Gangs of New York, in the opening scene of the movie, just before the big Five Points fight.

Aaannddd last but not least, I spent $12.00 on the “Best of the Web” issue of Step Inside Design magazine, because it highlights a couple of projects I worked on while at BBK Studio: Discovering Design and Pique.