kellan_the_tabby

From:

I have a nightstand on my side of the bed. It's actually a small chest of drawers for a child's room. Since I happen to have a cold, I wanted to be able to reach the box of tissues on the nightstand, but the box was on the side away from the bed, and I had to get out of bed to blow my nose. So I decided to rearrange everything on top of the nightstand. There was a an extension cord that had had a number of things plugged into it, but I got rid of the answering machine when we canceled the land line. Currently it's just a clock radio and a touch-to-turn-on lamp. I was planning on getting a narrow basket and attaching it to the wall with COmmand hooks (the ones you can remove without annoying your landlord). But when I looked at the Command products, they had a 'picture shelf' - narrow and the right size. I expected to put an outlet strip on it, but the outlet strips were too wide. But the end of the extension cord fit nicely. And when I plugged the wall-wart for the radio into the extension, it fit perfectly on the shelf. I just have to put some zip-ties or something around the wires so they lie neatly on the little shelf. So there's a small marble bowl for random bits of costume jewelry, and a plastic bin for the pile of hair scrunchies and oversized safety pins. And the only other things on the surface are holders for my phone and my glasses, and a Feng Shui mirror because the door into the room is next to the nightstand (which is believed to be "inauspicious"). My nightstand is the only thing I use a lot that's anywhere near "neat". (The drawers hold accessories and pajamas and nighties). It makes the bed feel wider when I lie down to sleep. (THe Command line has things like that shelf, robe hooks for the bathroom, and all sorts of other useful things for people who rent, or who live in a dorm and aren't allowed to nail stuff to the wall.)

This house really needs a whole house upgrade to split/cycle heating and cooling, and probably improved electrical power, and I'd also love to have a Generac, because every time there's any heavy weather (which is often) we lose power for an unpredictable length of time. But our landlord always fixes serious things for us (like when a pipe froze in the crawl space and we used several hundred gallons of water in a week), and he's charging us the same rent as when we moved here in 2004. We're a nice elderly couple, we don't give him trouble, and he knows that we used to be homeowners and we can patch a hole in the sheet rock or stop the toilet from overflowing.