Reconstructing/Deconstructing

It's been a little over two months since we moved into our new headquarters in Red Hook, and (no surprise) we've only barely unpacked considering we've also been trying to get our food truck business on the road. Running a small business, while also holding down a day job, has left zero time for housekeeping. The accumulation of dust and dishes and dirty laundry has reached new heights. Plus we're so busy cooking for customers, we've done hardly any cooking for ourselves lately. However a new charcoal grill in our backyard has been serving us nicely all summer, whenever we do muster up the energy to feed ourselves.

As I mentioned in my last post, things were off to a rough start when our new landlord neglected to renovate our apartment in time for our move in date. If we ever find time to finish installing the backsplash to our lovely Ikea kitchen, I'll post photos here, but for now we are still living in a bit of a construction site.

One project I did manage to tackle was the construction of a big bookcase (Ikea of course) behind our bed. I got the idea when Mr Homewrecker and I were watching Deconstructing Harry recently. Woody Allen's character has this very cozy, bookish New York apartment with a giant bookcase behind his bed, and it struck me as a great solution for not only adding vertical storage to our studio apartment, but for making the bedroom end of our living space more visually striking. The shelves just behind the headboard serve as night stands, meaning less pieces of furniture we need to cram into the studio. I also gave myself a narrow shelf for laptop storage and a cubby below to stash my purse.

Since our space is small, we've decided to keep the walls, curtains and bedspread white and pale gray so the room feels as light and airy as possible. Plus it keeps the busy colors and textures of the bookcase from overwhelming the space.

In addition to having walls that run at strange angles to one another, there's also hardly a right angle or level surface in the whole building. When I get up in the morning and walk across the apartment, I frequently lose my balance half way across the kitchen when the floor pitches to the right. I'm not sure what to do about that, but to deal with the dimensions of the room, we placed the bookcase at an angle to the wall so that the bed can run parallel to the windows. I haven't done it yet, but I'm thinking about cutting a hole into the back of the bookcase to create a secret hiding space behind the shelves, which is something my 8 year old self would have been ALL about.