Making Your Home Look Like An Adult Lives In It
When I moved into my first post-college apartment, I was just so ecstatic to be out of my parents’ home that I could have been moving in with an insane hoarder and been totally okay with it. Which I guess I was, since I discovered one of my new roommates was a hoarder who had lived there for nearly 10 years. Too naïve to care, I took whatever furniture I could fit from my high school bedroom and some remnants of my college life (specifically, Bed Bath and Beyond’s college dorm section from 2007 and Target bedding for my TWIN bed) and stuffed it into my woman crypt (like a man cave, but not lame as hell).
Three-and-a-half years later, I’m still in the same apartment (now with a full-sized bed though!), thanks to cheap rent combined with much better roommates once the hoarder moved out. But I’ve become hyper aware of how much my living space looks like it’s still stuck in that fresh-out-of-college but could-be-mistaken-for-college phase.
I know I want to move out of this neighborhood/state/coast completely one day, and I’m also closer to 30 than 20, so I need to purge some of these items from the past and figure out what the hell a grown-ass woman’s living environment should look like. To help guide me, I’ve created this list of self/home improvement tips that I hope would make Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor grunt in agreement with:
- Walk into a Pottery Barn and stand there for 15 minutes without getting intimidated by the surroundings. You are NOT a PBteen anymore! (And to be honest, you never were.)
- Take down the Abbey Road poster you bought in college that’s just covering up a hole in the wall from when you moved in. While you’re at it, take down any poster you bought in college, including Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness that’s strategically placed above your bed frame.
- If you have any bedding that’s so old it was present for either your first period or losing your virginity, it should be long gone by now, like your girlhood — and hymen.
- You know that tiny, corner shelving unit that used to hold potpourri and tchotchkes in your grandmother’s bathroom at her old house that you currently store all your books on, waiting for the day it inevitably collapses? That’s not a bookshelf. Buy a bookshelf.
- Was it placed there by a thumb tack or fun tak? Remove it. All of it. This is not an elementary school classroom. (Plus, those kids would probably make fun of your room for being so childish. You keep your rings on a unicorn and your earrings in a peacock!)
- That giant marker board you put in your kitchen before your first apartment party seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the once erasable ink has become a tattoo of dick drawings, Simpsons characters and the most usage of the word “poop” in a sentence, ever. Destroy all evidence of this, and if you feel compelled to replace the marker board, use it to write adult things you need to do, like buy groceries. Remember groceries?
- This one hurts the most, but if it’s a decorative item that was found in Target’s dollar section and purchased on a whim, you should reconsider its purpose. Even if it’s a cute, floral, (garden?) bucket (vase?) that’s currently holding no items. (Would it be flowers? Do flowers go in this?)
- I don’t care if you don’t even like taking shots and the reason you bought that “Saturday Night Live” shot glass was because it was the last day of your first writing internship that was in the same building as SNL and you bought it as a “maybe one day I’ll work there!” gift to yourself years ago — shot glasses are not cool things to display in a bedroom, at any age. Also, Lorne Michaels would NEVER.
- IKEA is still an okay place to buy furniture as an adult. You’re not a millionaire or the pope or something.
- You’re doing a good job with the Swiffer-ing. There was a lot of negativity in this list, so I just wanted to end it with one positive note. Keep it up! (Because if you ever stop, your entire apartment will be enveloped by dust and sink into the earth, never to be seen again. And then your landlord will keep your security deposit.)
