Ms. Typist: Interior Designer Extraordinaire

For many years now I’ve harbored the belief that within me lurks a talented interior designer just waiting to get out, and that somehow my ideal career passed me by. There is no reason to believe I have any talent whatsoever in interior design, but that hasn’t stopped me from pouring many hours into House Flipper, and more recently, House Flipper 2. In my own, quite inflated opinion, I have created hundreds of beautiful, inspired and well-balanced bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms, despite the earlier game offering limited choices of furnishings and décor. I lovingly fuss over every placement, every subtle shade of paint and carpet, and each balance of style and design. Goofy home-design games aside, in real life, I also take a lot of pride in pulling off a beautiful look each year at this big stressy work soiree I put on. For this most recent one, I used an hefty chunk of the budget to ensure that the napkin rings were exactly the right ones, and it was totally worth it because they picked up the gold and copper in the centerpieces perfectly and pulled the entire room together in a warm, golden harmony.

So with this supposed talent for interior design, why didn’t I ever pursue it as a career? Two things: Curtain rods and granite counter tops. When I was young, I had no self-esteem whatsoever and just believed everything anyone told me about my deficiencies and deficits. I don’t remember who said this to me, but in high school, I was talking to some idiot authority figure or another about wanting to study interior design, and he (maybe she?) told me that I wouldn’t be able to since I was terrible at math and interior design required measuring curtain rods. I didn’t put it together at the time that measuring curtain rods doesn’t exactly require a PhD in applied mathematics, I just took it at face value that I wouldn’t be able to properly measure curtain rods, and consequently I would fail out of design school in abject shame. The other thing was granite counter tops. I didn’t want to have deal with high-maintenance couples arguing endlessly over the virtues of Andino White versus Costa Esmeralda. I grew up in base housing and it was all pre-fab particle board for me, and I wasn’t going to have any patience with petty squabbling by hoity-toity couples who could afford custom granite counter tops. In short, it was a weird mixture of low self-esteem and reverse snobbery.

But now that I am aged, with experience and confidence to my name, I think am ready to start actually exploring interior design more formally than what House Flipper affords me. With the proliferation of online classes, a lot of them free, there’s no reason I can’t take a proper gander at it. I’m pretty sure I can find a basic introductory course that will drive home in no uncertain terms all of the embarrassing design errors I’ve made in House Flipper. I’ll keep you posted on whether that burgeoning interior designer emerges, or retreats in horror at the prospect of measuring curtain rods.

--Kristen McHenry