Let's talk spaces -- the Makeup "Nook" retires I

I know that you all are completely intrigued by my container addiction, but let me put that aside for a bit and talk about spaces.

Oh reader . . . are you like me?

Do you dream of spaces?

Do you awake one morning and realize that you have dreamt all night about a walk-in closet miraculously discovered in a home where you have lived for years? In your dreams did you find a doorway, or ROOM -- perhaps hidden by a simple curtain you have never noticed before?

I have such dreams in much the same way that a chocolate addict dreams of truffles, or a coffee addict dreams of chewing roasted beans. (Well, OK, I have that dream too, but let's not get off track.)

(Well, just one more sidetrack). My daughter continues to dream about helping me move out of our 4-bedroom house and into a small condo. After we have the condo completely full (and have made numerous donation trips to the Salvation Army), we go back to the old house and find it still full.

This is, of course, a nightmare.

But when I dream of rooms, closets, and more rooms, I'm dreaming of coveted spaces, and these are not nightmares. No doubt these SPACES are meant to CONTAIN all of that stuff still left in that old house.

Just kidding. I'm aware of how necessary it is to weed out the unnecessaries and streamline our lives.

But this doesn't explain why I hang onto so much makeup.

Which leads us to the current topic -- the makeup "nook"  (see photo #1).
 

Photo #1:  The makeup "nook."

I know. Kind of scary, isn't it?

Let me explain.  This is/was a desk area in the corner of our master bedroom.  Since I'd already confiscated an entire bedroom in another part of the house (another post) as office space, and because the bathroom counter had NO ROOM (another post) for my stuff, I decided to make this area a make-up "nook."

And it worked reasonably well, for a while.  The three-way mirror you see there came out of my mother's house and I hated to not use it.  As a person devoted to knowing what the back of my head looks like at all times, I've always loved three-way mirrors.  (Oh, happy were the days I listened to the Monkees and sang "Cheer up Sleepy Jeannie" into my hairbrush/microphone in front of that mirror!)

But I digress.

So, I took the salvaged mirror and crammed it into the nook.  I "forced" the "keyboard tray" to become a drawer of sorts.  I tried to store my makeup and hair-styling implements in the three drawers to the right, but that was largely inefficient and the spaces were just WRONG for what I had to store.  Plus, even though I thought I could store everything in the bazillion shelves residing inside that mirror, I was wrr.  I was wrrr.

OK, I was WRONG.

The corner was so dim that I needed extra lights, and when I stood the lamps up in front of the mirror, I couldn't really get to the inside shelves.  This meant that everything was either stashed out on top of the desk, or was in a mess down below.  I kept thinking that I could find the right type of containers, boxes, trays, tools to organize all of this, but it never really worked right.

Frustration ensued, and I was seldom pleased or inspired by this space.

Then one golden day I saw *it,* the answer to all of my problems.

A darling little mahogany desk with 8 lovely drawers of just the right size.  (I felt like Goldilocks!)

Clearly the little desk would not fit in the nook (which was already occupied by this 3-way mirror and this built-in but-essentially-useless "desk").  It took some figuring,   Then I realized there was a place where I could put it where it would work very well.

Then I found online (quite by accident while researching "little mahogany desks that can also double as a vanity") a DARLING antique mahogany 3-way mirror.  Ever wonder why Goldilocks said "this one is 'just right'"?

So the story is that out of chaos comes calm, peace, and happy kitties.

The happy kitty is just a sidebar, but as you will discover in this blog, every sidebar has purpose.

And if you would like to know more, please come back to see the process!

And so (until next time), as "Mapp and Lucia" used to say, "au reservoir!"