Thanks, but no thanks. The ideas were stupid, ugly, impractical, and/or just plain strange. I don't think the author(s) ever lived in an apartment before. It reminded me of the book I have about small gardens. The first picture was of the upper garden and the next, the lower garden. Now if you have an upper and a lower garden, you don't really have a small garden, do you?
But I digress. To return to the topic at hand - which is making fun of the 19 apartment ideas in case you hadn't figured that out yet:
- Why are there 19 ideas? Not 10, 15, or 20? Couldn't you think of one more?
- You only put curtains over bookshelves when they are used to store junk instead of books, or when they hold pornographic books or bomb-making manuals. Otherwise, it just looks cheap or like you are hiding bomb-making/terrorists manuals. Now, if you're a college student or just starting out on your first job and everybody knows you can't afford nice furniture, this looks shabby chic and it's OK.
- Make do with storage shelves but make them look as pretty as possible. a) There isn't any room in the average apartment for extra storage shelves, b) Storing clutter on them is not pretty no matter how you arrange it, c) They don't make small spaces look bigger unless you think "crammed in" is another word for spacious.
- "Hide unattractive storage" by covering with cloth is not new - people have been throwing sheets over crap for decades.
- Don't have room for seating? Get some large throw pillows to toss on the floor, stack them somewhere out of the way when they aren't being used. Uh, people, if I don't have room for a chair, I don't have room for overstuffed floor pillows. Actually, they showed cloth covered squares of foam rubber that were about 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick. Not my idea of a comfy seat.
- The idea to stick a file cabinet under the sink in your kitchen to use for extra drawer space wasn't a bad idea - if you have empty space under your sink, which you probably won't, but they went one step too far. Number the drawers, then keep a list of the contents elsewhere. That way, if you change the contents you don't have to re-label the drawer, just change your list. Uh, wouldn't it be easier to just open the drawer to see what's inside than to hunt for the list?
- Here's a good one - buy an armless couch and position it away from the wall so you can walk around it, then put one or two coffee tables in front of it. If you put your couch away from the wall far enough to comfortably walk behind it in most apartments, you wouldn't have room for a coffee cup in front of it, much less a couple of coffee tables.
- Then they suggest, you put a glass topped console behind it to use for your home office. OK. Glass isn't the best material to use here, because people are going to have to walk over it to get from one side to the other and glass will really show those footprints.
- Their best use of awkward corners was to buy two file cabinets and throw a sheet of melamine on top. I know you can't see the picture from where you are, but, trust me, that doesn't fit in a corner.
- Throw out old papers and stick the ones you have to keep in a box. Duh, why didn't you think of that?
- Can't hang art on the wall because you're afraid to put a nail there in case you can't get your deposit back? Stick a colorful surf board in a corner. Cowabunga, dude! If you surf, this is great, but it will look just plain silly if you live in the middle of the mid-west. And it's not going to make your apartment look one inch bigger, a couple of feet smaller maybe, but not any bigger. (And, just so you know, the odds are probably 1 to 10 that you'll get back that deposit anyway. Just saying.)
- To sum up most of the suggestions, if all else fails, stick it in a box, stick the box in a book case, and cover it up with a sheet.
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