The Library
It’s a cold and rainy Sunday morning in Brooklyn. I’ve spent the last thirty minutes using the laser pointer to send Jinx scurrying all over the library rug. I’ve got a mug of chocolate chai tea, and Iron & Wine on the iPod. My side hurts, but I’m just going to ignore it today.
I love the library. It’s my favorite room in the house. So peaceful and inviting and cozy. It’s the cats’ favorite room, too. No TV, just all my comics and books and toys and swords. Back when I lived with Cobie, it was his bedroom, but once he moved out and Dani moved in, it became a blank, 20 x 13 canvas.
At first, we filled it with random shit: The spare futon, my old desk, some ikea furniture. It was a nice retreat, but it was still ugly as sin, and kind of ghetto, but we were renting, so whatever.
Once we decided to buy the place, Dani and I started going to Gothic Cabinet & Craft for nicer furniture. It was still relatively inexpensive, but a big step up from shitty, build-it-yourself Ikea. We picked the pieces unstained, and then had them stained all the same color. It was an ENORMOUS help in getting matching pieces without hunting the world over.At that point, the library looked like this:
We bought the place in August of 2003, and that December, I started remodeling work in earnest. We couldn’t afford to do it all at once. We had spent nearly every penny we had on the down payment and closing fees, and at the time, I wasn’t very savvy about home equity loans and whatnot.
So we decided to do one room at a time, as funds and time allowed. I had a lot of unused vacation time, and am moderately handy, and I was excited to work on something that was MINE. I bought the Home Depot Home Improvement 1-2-3 book, did some reading on painting and wiring and the like, and decided I could do it. I took a week off in December of that year to try my hand.
Little did I know my wife had secretly submitted me to be on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. More on that later.
Since the library was the room least essential to our day-to-day, I decided to do it first. I went to the Benjamin Moore site and used their Paint Colorizer tool to pick colors. If you’re not familiar with the tool, and interested in painting a room or house one day, I HIGHLY recommend it. You can choose from a number of stock room photos, and then digitally add in any of the thousands of BM colors. You can experiment with combining different colors for the ceiling, walls, trim, highlights, hallway, etc.
Since the library was where I kept all my fantasy books, and already had dark mahogany stained furniture, I decided I wanted a forest theme to the color scheme. The Paint Colorizer really allowed me to experiment with bold colors, and ignore the dozen or so people who told me that “You can’t use dark colors on your walls, it will make the room look small”.
Those people are full of shit. That’s an old wives’ tale.
I chose a dark forest green for the walls, with a russet brown for the trim (Historical Green and Sweet Rosy brown, by BM terminology). It matched the furniture perfectly, and even matched the green corduroy futon that Dani brought when she moved in. The ceiling I did in a very light tan, to add a little brighness and reflect the ceiling light fixture. The color was called “Lambskin”, which still makes me think of condoms.
I spent the first day of my ‘vacation’ hauling everything out of there, and going to hardware stores with my dad. We taped plastic over the floor and ripped out all the ancient two-prong electrical outlets and fire-hazard light fixture, had the windows and screens professionally replaced, fixed the heaters, drilled holes to run internet cables, repaired the latches and handles on the closets, and then attacked all the cracks in the walls. I was determined to do the job once, and do it perfectly. My dad had a sinus infection, and dropped out after the first day. I was scared to be on my own, but I had my book, and it’s not like it was brain surgery. I spent two more days widening cracks in the plaster to fit spackle, sanding, then doing it all over again. Cobie had put glow in the dark sickers all over the ceiling. Those motherfuckers were a bitch to get off. Either they took the paint and a chunk of plaster with them, or they left sticky glue that gummed up the sander and stained through the primer.
It was in this period when I got a call from the Queer Eye people, asking me to come in for an interview. I was shocked, not having applied. I dimly remembered Dani asking if she could put my name in months before, but I had no idea she actually DID it.
I was pretty disgusting at the time. I had grown a thick beard, and my hair had spackle dust embedded in it even after I lathered, rinsed, and repeated. I decided to go with that, and went in to the interview in my remodeling clothes.
They did a taped interview of me. The show would be to fix me up, fix the apartment up, and do something for our upcoming wedding in 2004. I was trying to find the right balance between good, likable guy, and insensitive male, but I was mostly just honest. I never watched the show. My apartment looked like shit, my fiancee hated it, and I didn’t give a damn what the flowers at our wedding looked like. I was practical middle class. Dani was an Uptown Girl. But I loved her like the summer solstice day was long, and wanted her to be happy.
I also showed them pictures of our ugly apartment, which went a long way. We have high ceilings, arched entrances, and hardwood floors. The apartment was upscale when the complex was built in 1939 or whatever. Beautiful trim, hidden under countless coats of cheap paint. Crappy plastic blinds on the few windows with any treatment at all. Lots of potential for a gay man with a taste for decorating.
They said they’d call me, and I left figuring that was that.
Back home, I sanded and primed and taped and started painting. The actual painting didn’t take too long. It’s the spackling, sanding, and taping that takes FUCKING FOREVER. When that was done, I put in the new three prong outlets and fancy new light fixture. I bought blinds to match the trim (not easy to find maroon blinds, I might add).
The finished product looks like this:
Oh, and let’s not forget the nerdiest gem of it all, my LOTR diorama:
So right after the room was finished, I got another call from Queer Eye. They wanted to come see the apartment and interview me and Dani. A couple of interns came over and filmed us, verfiying that the apartment was indeed shitty but with great potential. We talked a long while, and they seemed very nice.
Then I showed them the library, warning them that I had just remodeled it. Both of them were stunned. The girl said, “This is like the hidden treasure room!”
They told me that they needed a ‘control room’ for the show, where the crew put all their shit, and said that would need to be the room, since it was so out of character with the rest of the house, and there was no way they could improve it anyway. Then they left.
I got a call soon after saying that there were several producers interested in our case, but they were going to pass. The girl was nice, and said that the producers often have their own ideas about what they want the show to be, and go looking for someone to fit that vision, not to find a vision.
But I always wonder if it was the library that broke the deal. The room says so very much about who I am and what I love that ignoring it would be to ignore most of the things that make me me. What producer would pass up the chance to have the Queer Eye guys laugh about all my comics and toys? Not a good one.
Plus, if I do say so myself, the room is proof that I can decorate on a budget as well as any ass on Bravo.
Maybe I was just a little too gay for the Queer Eye guys, which is just as well. One by one, I poured just as much love into the other rooms of the house, and I wouldn’t change a damn thing.