Every so often, I get into a thing where I look around the house, notice something WRONG about it, and become fixated. I understand that there are people who feel this towards their own bodies, and doubtless was one of them here and there in my younger days, but I am 40, look 40, and cannot abide by the current storage situation in my home.
What we have are bookcases, basically. For books. For not-books. It works for the books! Less so for the wide range of other items. So we now have a Billy bookcase containing kids’ art supplies, cookbooks, podcasting equipment, keys, recent (one hopes) mail (i.e. sharing entryway surface-type functions with the kitchen counter, neither of which are located in the entryway), toy bins, and a face-painting set. Also a rotating cast of things that needed to be put up high, quickly, to be out of reach of a child who found it distracting or didn’t realize how hard of a whack it would make or whatever.
All of this sort of was what it was until we did the kitchen. The kitchen had been the source of nearly all my house-related angst—the counters at giant’s height, the awkwardly-laid-out pantry in a space that would fit a far more useful toilet and sink.
Resolving the kitchen issues fortunately did not make me fixate for more than a moment on the new kitchen’s own flaws. Rather, it made the other rooms more saliently not-thought-out. And by swapping a pantry for a powder room, by putting a kitchen table where counters and cabinets might have gone, we gave up a fair bit of kitchen storage. So there’s now the kitchen, and then the kitchen-overflow section of the unfinished basement. It’s not tragic (please nobody write about this for Guernica) but it’s a bit annoying.
So the time has come to find a piece of furniture that will go up against a dining room wall and miraculously fix the problem. If nothing else, there would be a surface closer to the entryway to put keys and mail, and some drawers for miscellaneous items, and with whatever space remains, the kitchen overflow could be reallocated into a room that is at least more accessible from the kitchen.
You can go on websites to read about the difference between a credenza/sideboard/buffet, but as best as I can tell, if you call it a “credenza” the implication is that it will be teak or teak-looking, mid-century modern (MCM, I now know from Craigslist), and provide your home with a Mad Men aesthetic. I have (still!) not seen Mad Men, but what little I know of it, it is not my lifestyle. I would prefer a Poirot-inspired piece of furniture but for some reason MCM is what exists, what is sought, maybe sideboards didn’t exist in the 1920s-1930s?
OK, I have looked this up, they did, but there’s no glut of them on Facebook Marketplace so as far as I’m concerned they might as well not be a thing.
Every time this happens, every time we need a new piece of furniture, it is the same loop. I research what I’d like for that space/purpose; learn about the $8,000 platonic-ideal of it; find some version of it, used and magnificent, but with some compromises needed, for $600. Then I go on the cursèd IKEA website and find something exactly right in terms of function for $200. That is always the winner.
What’s the problem?
I am trying to articulate this for myself, because I’m not sure it is a problem that aside from a blue velvet ottoman I once bought on Craigslist from an office across the street, all our furniture, all, is from the Swedish flatbox retailer. I know that environment-wise, one is meant to object to the way IKEA stuff gets used then tossed, but… clearly we are using and not tossing this furniture that we have now had for years. And a lot of it looks nice! Nicer, at least, than the mid-range mass-produced alternative that looks like it’s trying to knock off IKEA.
We didn’t always live like this, but various moves meant that we no longer have the more interesting items we got in one way or another (from my parents’ apartment, or from a stoop in Brooklyn) when we were still in/near my hometown. Our move back to Toronto after a mini-stint in NYC followed a year during which I had less income than usual (despite working quite a bit!), paired with higher-than-usual housing costs, and what we have now is more or less the furniture from that moment.
That was 2017. It is now 2024 and maybe this is something to address? But then I get into that other loop of, it’s silly to do anything until our kids are a bit older, too much mess now, too much entryway taken up by stroller.
But I am someone who cares immensely about something like which jacket I have, not as in it needs to be high-end, but it has to be a specific $40 thrift-store blazer, cut a certain way, out of specific materials. What if I applied some of that focus to a piece of furniture? As fine as I am with individual IKEA items, I don’t like feeling as though I live in an IKEA, and it does look a bit that way.
So I am on the hunt for a credenza. A buffet. A sideboard. Perhaps even a hutch. I am going to resist the siren call of the VIHALS.
That bookshelf full of random stuff sure looks familiar. I have one serving the same function in my dining room.... what do you mean, there is other furniture besides bookshelves?
Just got a nice mcm sideboard from Article, $1100, very high quality. Endorsed!