I am a tentative home owner.
“Tentative”, as I’m not yet sitting in my new shack of a condo, looking out at the faux waterfall and enjoying the audio cacophony of SFO flights above. Seems like all I’m doing nowadays is waiting and stressing out about waiting; I see why they build a lot of padding into the entire home purchasing process. Of course, when the elements gather, there’s a 2-3 hour flurry as agents and brokers scramble to save the deal, all poetically puncutuated by fifty copies of my signature.
For all intents and purposes though, I will live in a unit at South City Lights. Nestled in the heart of South San Francisco (it’s a separate city), the area offers only overpriced housing (as opposed to grossly overpriced housing) in the Bay Area with proximity the much more expensive San Mateo and San Francisco areas. Really, it’s the ugly middle child sandwiched amongst his more successful older brother and better-looking younger sister.
The place I’m getting is a modest one-bedroom condo overlooking – well – faux rocks leading to the aforementioned faux waterfall. The unit comes fully furnished, but in conjunction with my existing conglomerate of second-hand furniture, leaves me with quite an excess of stuff I need to sell, give, or throw away…
Which has me planning out how to lay out the rooms. Paper cutouts have worked in the past, but this task required a bit more finesse: enter Ikea and their Home Planner (1). They have been releasing a Windows-only tool for Ikea shoppers to lay out a room, then furnish it with Ikea products, complete with furniture dimensions, colors, and prices.
The best part is seeing the entire thing in 3D to get a feel for how the room would actually look. I’ve been playing around with it, and here’s what my room may very well look like (with Ikea products understudying for the real pieces):
In the housing world, I believe they refer to this as “cozy”.
- ironically, I have sworn off Ikea’s pay-for-design-not-quality furniture as college and post-college goods (↩)