Is There A 12 Step Program For This?

Hello, my name is Hey Pretty and I am an addict.

My addiction is not the sort where I am compelled to buy copious pairs of shoes, gamble on slots, or eat massive amounts of ice cream. No, this addiction is of a far quirkier nature. I cannot but help to compulsively rearrange furniture.

I have been afflicted by this disease for as long as I can remember. For several years when I was a child, my mother ran her own interior design business. I came of age watching her draw up floor plans for her clients, pore over paint chips, and obsess about task lighting and slipcover fabrics. During this time it became a hobby of mine to sketch floor plans for my dream bedroom, imagine how I might somehow renovate our decaying barn into a rocking bachelorette pad, and the merits of glass bricks and those metal spiral staircases that were all the rage in the 80's. Much to my mother's chagrin, I would periodically move the furniture in my bedroom around, simply to mix things up and to experience my living space in a new way.

Since then my addiction hasn't waned. Whenever I enter another person's home, my brain immediately starts imagining where I would put my own possessions if I lived in that space. I love to visit local furniture stores such as Miss Pixies and Good Wood, simply to add new pieces to my fantasies. And I continue to periodically reconfigure my furniture arrangements.

As most of you know, I live in a group house. Here's a little more information about my living set-up. Our home is quite large and was built in the early 1900s. I live on the third and top floor (I am always attracted to the top floor of residential buildings. I like to be high up with the trees as if living in a nest.) I have two rooms. The first room I have configured as a lounge/entertaining area. It contains an old sofa concealed by a khaki colored canvas slip cover and a few handmade quilts; an antique sewing machine table; a dark wood ladder style bookcase from Crate and Barrel; and an orange leather chair purchased by my parents in the late '60s. It was designed and manufactured in Sweden and represents the groovy modernist design ethos of that period. This lounge/entertaining area is not large. It measures approximately 8'x10'. A while back I painted it a silvery-green color, and I have hung some of my favorite photographs on the walls.

Perhaps the best aspect of this room however is the 2nd floor roof that this room accesses. You have to climb over the orange chair, and out the window to get to it, but it's sort of like a balcony and I tend to sit out there in nice weather reading and smoking cigarettes. It's also a nice place to bring dates to with a couple of beers. No, I have never "gotten it on" on the roof (I get that question a lot).

From the lounge/entertaining area you enter my actual bedroom. This room measures approximately 10'x 12.5'. It has two windows, with really excellent recessed window sills. My bed sits under one of the windows, on the wall parallel to the one with the door. I use the window sill above my bed as a bedside table, and it contains an old lamp given to me by D, some candles, and a stack of whatever books I am currently reading (I am never reading just one). The room also contains a dresser and another bookcase. There is art work on  the walls of this room as well, although I really need to paint because the walls are a blah off white and are pocked by old nail holes and other manifestations of wear and tear.

As of late yesterday afternoon, there is now an old oak writing table in one corner of the room. It had been living in the third floor hallway ever since I moved in three years ago because I had always assumed it would be too large to gracefully fit into the floor plan of my bedroom. I thought wrong.

The old oak writing table came to be in this particular place out of necessity for a reliable writing area in the house. Over the past several months I had been using our dining room table for such purposes, but G, who is moving out on Saturday recently took over the entire room as a storage area for his junk, and I can no longer settle comfortably into that space. That, and I felt bad taking up so much space in a common area of the house.

I really needed a quiet, comfortable, well-lit corner in which to apply for jobs and set up my writing portfolio. Yesterday I was surveying the available space in my room and noticed that if I tweaked the floor plan just a little, I might be able to fit the writing table into that space in a graceful and efficient manner.

I hadn't arranged my furniture in over a month, so clearly I was due for another session. The last time I rearranged, I declared the end product the absolute best furniture configuration possible with the pieces currently available to me. I promised myself (and a few others) that this would be it, as the floor plan could never be improved upon and it was time I accepted that and found a new strange activity to compulse over.

But the thing with addictions is that this time is never the last time. And while I love my new set up (which reminds me a bit of a garret where a 1920's French girl might have once slaved over her poetry or her sketches) I fully admit that this probably isn't the final arrangement.

It's a commonly held belief that an organized living space is essential to creating an organized mind, a philosophy I have grudgingly come to accept over the years. I suspect that my compulsion to reorganize my living space is in part an attempt to furbish the sometimes dark interior of my own mind. Like if I can create the optimum furniture arrangement, I may open up some clogged synapses that have been preventing me from being as creative, productive, and as happy as I can be. If anything, it seems to freshen things up a bit. Nothing depresses me more than stagnation--of any kind.

There is also an aesthetic component at work here. I happen to be a very visually oriented individual. I minored in art history in college and devoted quite a bit of my studies as an English major to the interplay between visual aesthetics and literary theory.

Objects of beauty are like religious talismans to me. I like to look at things and find prettiness in them. The other day for instance, I spent a good while staring at a small section of my boyfriend's head, marveling at the many different colors of strands it housed, trying to determine the best color to describe his hair as a whole. He was so busy watching an Eric Clapton concert on You Tube that I doubt he even noticed.

And  to be honest, furniture rearranging also makes me very happy, and being very happy makes me productive. Today for example, I have already applied for two jobs and later on I intend to vacuum and run errands.

I've never been able to tell how destructive this compulsion is. I read once that re-organizing and furniture arranging are manifestations of ADD, and that doesn't surprise me.

But as long as I'm not harming myself or anyone else, I see no real problem with my obsession. I have trained myself to only do it during the day, as to not disturb others with the sounds of furniture being dragged across floors, and I am very realistic about what types of furniture I can handle without doing harm to my physical self. I always lift with my knees and never with my back, and if a task is too cumbersome, I abandon it or ask a strapping lad for help. There is always a fine assortment of such to choose from.

Should I ever live with another individual as part of a couple, I suppose this habit could be a bit annoying. I guess we'd have to live in a space that includes a small study or studio that would belong only to me, that I could rearrange at will.

Until then, I will probably continue my little obsessive hobby. At least until I find another to take its place.

In the comments section, suggest an alternative to furniture rearranging. It must be something that includes re-arranging things of aesthetic value. Then tell me about your strange hobby.

Comments

[paige]

Me too. I rearranged my furniture today. I do it every couple of weeks. Wall painting too.

[Simon Gower]

Great post, Great to know i'm not alone on this! ;-) I think its like rearranging your Chi! Very therapeutic.