There were three selling points for this house: the kitchen was marvelous, we could afford the mortgage without any sort of adjustable rate tomfoolery and it had a loft.
The loft has had a couple of identities in the almost seven years we’ve lived here.
First, it was the Capt’n's motorsport loft. Oh, yes. Racing flags tacked to the ceiling, vintage Monaco posters, a few dead traffic cones, and the showstopper: one accent wall painted in black and white checkers. And even though we called it his loft, during the winter we’d both be up there, watching television, reading or just hanging out.
As time marched on, the Capt’n became less obsessed with racing and more intent on building an army of tiny robots. The loft, while staying with the original petrolhead theme, was overrun with Autobots and Decepticons in various states of transformation. Meanwhile, we were both indulging in a passion for books and running out of places to put them.
It all came to a head last autumn, when we decided to shift around the contents of the upstairs and better organize our junk. The robots were shifted into the front spare bedroom, the motorsports paraphernalia was moved into the garage. We painted over the checkers with a cheerful brick red, and lined the walls with bookcases. The loft now serves as our library.
At the time, we didn’t have to purchase any new furniture. We recovered the ratty old sofa I’d brought into the marriage, swapped the plywood-and-tire coffee table for the pedestal table I had refinished ages before, and moved in a nice club chair and mismatched footstool I’d found in a consignment shop and had given to the Capt’n for his birthday.
To quote the Shell Silverstein poem, it was almost perfect, but not quite. The sofa didn’t work with the orientation of the room. It was too bulky for the space, there wasn’t a good way to read in a comfortable position and the new slipcover was a magnet for cat hair. And really, I wanted my own chair and my own ottoman. I mean, who wouldn’t?
A trawl through the consignment shops and Craigslist didn’t turn up any immediate winners. I didn’t find anything I really liked in any of the furniture stores, but I kept my options open. I knew what I wanted in my chair, but I didn’t constrain myself to a specific time frame.
And then, almost six months after the unveiling of the library loft, I found it. The perfect chair. It was at a new consignment shop on Central, just sitting there in a jumble of 1940s mahogany buffets, reproduction Queen Anne sofas and four poster beds. It was a sage green velvet beacon of hope, in chair form. It was also $150 out of my price range.
I didn’t buy it. I thought long and hard and decided, no. It could wait. If it was there when I went back, and if I could knock a hundred dollars off the price, then maybe I’d consider it.
I went back. The seller knocked a hundred bucks off the price. We hauled the old sofa away, and baby, I got a chair. (And what a chair. A quick scour of the Googs tells me that it would have retailed for about three grand. I just about choked when I read that. I walked away spending pennies on the dollar. Viva la second hand.)
The loft’s not quite finished, but it’s getting there. I need to hang a curtain and put up some artwork, but that’s just details. It’s coming together. It’s just about my favorite room in the house.