The Lounge

When we originally planned out what we were going to do with our upstairs space, the first room off the stairway was designated as a sort of lounge or den. And sticking with our historically flavored tastes, the idea was that it'd be done up in midcentury/Space Age style. We got a bit of painting and decoration done, but it got caught up in the general warehouseification. But now it's in shape and functional again.

This view is from the window across the room. The orange chair is vintage midcentury, purchased by my Scandinavian-furniture-loving grandparents in the 50s or 60s. There's a shelf of science-themed barware, vintage periodicals, a screen showing a long playlist of midcentury educational, industrial, and promotional films (duck and cover!), and a small gaming table I upcycled from something the neighbors across the street threw out.

Looking a little right (towards the front of the house), there's shelves of games, books, and DVDs. Where the library has a lot of academic works, the emphasis in this room is on works for entertainment.

Facing across the room towards the window. We built shelves around the window for Stephanie's record albums. The shelf on the left mostly fiction (including a large collection of Trixie Beldens), with a Victrola on the right.

Looking left of there, it's a shelf full of mostly games (including Car Wars and an awful lot of 3rd edition GURPS books) and art books. The green chair and the lamp next to it are, again, vintage from my grandparents.

Farther left, the rainbow weaving is something my grandmother made, while the bongos used to belong to Stephanie's father.That shelf is, of course, a hidden door, sliding aside to provide access to the rest of the upstairs.

And this is the view from the hidden door. That's a vintage suitcase style sound system in front of the panel of pinups. It opens up into a record player and speakers.

It's not a big room (13' x 9' with a bit of a chunk bitten out of it), but it's cozy.

Fully Armed and Operational Table Lamps

Many years ago, when we lived a five minute drive away from an Ikea, we picked up a lot of furniture, some of which we still use today. Something we ended up not using was a pair of Skyar table lamps, like this one:

There was nothing wrong with them, mind you. Nice clean candlestick design, and the heavy paper shade diffused the light from the bulb very well. Quality product. We just didn't have anywhere to put them when we moved into the house, and so they went up into the attic. I unearthed them not long ago during the big push to clear out and remodel, and by that time the paper shades were much worse for wear, so again we couldn't use them.

It was around this time, though, that Alex undertook his own major remodeling in his room, getting rid of the old loft bed and at the same time getting rid of years of clutter, which gave him room to move in some new stuff. And in thinking about whether he could use those lamps, I came across this design for a Death Star interior-style lamp shade. It was almost perfect. I had to tweak the design of the socket piece to make the hole a little larger, and I added some thin pieces printed in white filament to diffuse the light (could have used anything translucent, really, like some folded up layer of wax paper). Alex set them up on his dresser and put in some color-controllable LED bulbs for accent coloring. How did it work out? Pretty well, I think:

The Library

I may still do a few things with this room as some point, but I think it's in a sufficiently complete state to display.

Some time back, I finished turning a semi-finished space in my attic into an office space. This involved moving out a lot of old boxes and discarding a bunch of old stuff now no longer useful. The process slowly continued in the space adjacent to the office, which I turned into a somewhat steampunk-themed library/reading room. At the moment, it looks like this:

 

These are taken from the once and future guest room (still lots of work to do there but it's big enough for a sofa bed). The green curtain separates the library from the office. I'd put in the shelves on the left shortly after we moved in, before it got filled up with boxes, but the rest is new. The white structure on the right is something of an heirloom, a doll house built by hand for Stephanie by her grandfather. In theory, I'm in the process of renovating the lighting system. And the green rug is a lamb's wool rug I got in Nepal.

Other highlights of the room include:

Double bookcase! The one in front pivots open to reveal another layer of books. (That's a 1920s model Underwood on the upper left.)

 

Thing in the upper right of those first images is a knife switch controlling the lights over the tall bookshelves.

I built that green velvet chair, partly from the remains of a dismembered couch. It's surprisingly comfy.

And above the chair there's a porthole looking out of what is presumably an airship.

These vacuum tubes and mechanical switches are associated with the airship's aetheric stabilizers, tucked away between the tall bookshelves and the curtain.

And there's a gold art-deco border on the doorway between the library and the office.