Lamp Room

I have a room in my house that is technically a bedroom. (According to my home appraisal document.) It also has the potential to be an office. Or a Craft Room. Or a very snug Game Room.

Instead, it has become a Lamp Room.




Yes, there are six different lamps in that picture. With another three hidden behind the storage chest.

In my defense, it wasn't like I walked into the room, looked around, and thought hmmmm.... this would be an AWESOME place to display my lighting fixture collection. Some things just happen organically. A table light here, a floor lamp there, then bada bing! LAMP ROOM!

Clearly this room is actually a Junk Room. There is crap everywhere. Which only goes to show how overwhelming the percentage of Lampness is in the room. Even with random boxes everywhere, the lamps still shine through. It's not a junk room. It's a Lamp Room ... surrounded by a lot of junk.

I blame it mostly on my fickleness with lighting choices. I can walk into a furniture store and pick a coffee table with conviction people normally reserve for religious beliefs or dessert selection. (EPISCOPALIAN! CHOCOLATE RASPBERRY CHEESECAKE!) But when it comes to lamps, I'm pretty much ...ehhhhhh. I wander from store to store, looking at every combination of bronzed metal, brushed silver, and off-white shades. Nothing looks wrong, but nothing looks right. Eventually I get frustrated with my own uncertainty and just buy the one that is the ultimate combination of a) the cheapest and b) the easiest to carry to the check-out queue.  (Yes, I used "queue." I'm sick of my printer being the only thing that can reference a waiting line in British terms.)

Inevitably I regret the purchase. The shade is the wrong color. (Colour!) The metal finish seems garishly shiny or dirtily dull. (Daft!) And, even if those two features are actually okay, the scale is be way off. I mean, WAY off. In the store, the table lamps were Goliaths. But, propped up beside my overstuffed sofa, they come off looking like night lights and barely shine past the perimeter of the table below them.

(I feel should admit that my issues with estimating size isn't limited to just lamps. It extends to many other facets of my life: stopping distance behind cars, making cookies. I'll be scooping out dough with the exact same spoon, and one will come out the size of a quarter, with the next one spreading out to to the size of an above-ground pool cover. Which is why I now carry a ruler with me wherever I go. And only bake cookies alone.)

I get increasingly annoyed with how bad the lamp looks. Eventually I unplug it and stash it in my spare bedroom. Then I wind up sitting in the dark. Which leads me to go on another quest to find that elusive, perfect lamp. In an attempt to learn from my mistakes of the past, I try going in the opposite direction. Last lamp too small? This time I'll get a floor flamp! That one too outdated? I'll go modern with a square paper shade! So I wind up overcorrecting and, instead of shanking it, I hook it. So, after a few days of moving the new lamp to every possible corner of the room, I throw up my hands, unplug it, and plop it beside its rejected brethren.

You can imaging that, after a few cycles of this, boom. Lamp Room.

Also, in a cruel twist of irony, the Lamp Room is the darkest room in my house. The room has a light switch, but I'm having difficulty locating exactly which outlet this switch is supposed to switch on. I even had enough lamps to plug one into each socket, turn them all on, and then flip the switch to see which one it controlled. Nothing. So I just keep them all unplugged and feel my way to whatever I need out of the room. Which is never a lamp.

Last month, I finally ponied up some bucks and bought two lamps that seem to work pretty well. I have a good feeling about these. I think they're going to stick. They've certainly lasted way longer than any of their predecessors.

At this point, I have family members referring to it as the Lamp Room. It seems high time to rebrand.

My goal is to have this disaster of a room reorganized into something more useful. But, because reorganization seems way more time-intensive than just shutting the door (my current strategy), I know I'm going to need a pretty big carrot-and-stick combination to get me to do it.

So here's my plan: in a week I'm going to take a picture of the Lamp Room's current status and post it on this blog where anyone can see it. (Stick = public humiliation.) And, when I have successfully transformed it into something less lighting-like, I will celebrate with a sweet of some kind. (Carrot = dessert which will not involve carrots or vegetables of any kind.)

Let the rebranding begin!