Miss Home Improvement? Me? Not a chance...

So basically I loathe my apartment. It is ugly. Really really ugly. And tacky. It looks like a motel. Because it is, or was. My apartment building used to be a 'hotel' - and that's not surprising considering the state it was in when I first moved in. My friends and I call it 'the 1-star motel.'

When I first moved in, I removed the tasteful soft porn paintings of Japanese women and shoved them in the closet. I removed the ugly couch/bed coverings and hid those in the closet, along with my tacky lampshades, the hotel phone, and so on. My living room closet looks like a graveyard for tacky motel pieces.

Oh yes, my place is fully furnished - with tacky furniture. I haven't felt like investing in re-decorating because I didn't know what was going on with the working visa. I'd really like to move - but I don't have the money to buy furniture and I don't want to make the commitment to buying furniture either - so I'm just going to do a bit of re-decorating. Nothing major - just new curtains, some throws for the couches, some throw rugs, etc. with an actual colour scheme. That's right - things in my apartment may actually match! (Gasp!)

I have to do something. I mean, my apartment came with a frickin' Bible in the night-stand, after all. How motel is that? So I've picked my colours. Blue, green, and purple - these will be my new colours in my new & improved (okay, just improved) apartment.

So, I found curtains that I'm in love with - isn't that sad? To be in love with curtains? I've been staring at ugly thick polyester pink curtains from hell for 3 years. Buh-bye! The new dream curtains are green and blue at the top with this cool Chinese pattern, and then a pretty bright sheer blue the rest of the way down. I adore them (see, it's the little things that make me happy.) The other curtains are a sheer grape/purple.

Now, to prove to you even more how dumb I am, I just bought them, without giving any thought to how they would be put up. I have never actually bought curtains before. I just assumed they slid on the curtain rod. Then, when going to take down my ugly-ass pink polyester curtains I discovered that they didn't 'slide' on the curtain rod - they had a thousand little pins hooked up to these plastic hooks. Yuck. I opened up my new curtains. They require the whole curtain rod sliding thing. Doh, Lori - there are nails that need to be unscrewed. This situation would require....doh...a screwdriver.

Of course I had already taken down my ugly curtains and could not stand to put those suckers back up. I knew I owned screwdrivers....and I knew they were somewhere....probably in my closet (don't ask!) I have not used them since I moved in 3 years ago. I needed them to put together my desk and I haven't used them since. I actually found them in my closet, which was amazing. (In the process, I also found my little teddy bear, Hermes - don't ask me how he got in there!)

What was not amazing was my precarious situation on my unstable swivel office chair which is not high enough to be very effective. I was standing on my tip toes getting my old curtains off, and then I was trying to undo screws while on tippy toes while standing on an unsteady swivelling chair. As if I'm not accident prone while standing still on steady ground.

I found 3 screwdrivers, none of them a Phillips head. Of course that's exactly what I needed. I lent the Phillips head to a friend years ago and didn't make much of an effort to get it back, since I only use screwdrivers like once every three years. How useless am I? All I wanted was to hang up my pretty curtains!

So I went to bed with no curtains last night - boy is that sun helpful at 5am! ;-) So tonight, after work, I went and bought a set of small screwdrivers, including 2 Phillips heads, one of which I assumed would be the right size because I'd 'eyed' the nails. Hahahahahahaha. Yeah right. So, I ran home, whipped out the screwdrivers and they were both too small. :(

So, back to KMART again. This creepy KMART employee kept following me around and smiling at me and looking me up and down and saying, "Good morning!" It was 9.30pm....Anyhoo, I bought 2 more bigger Phillips head screwdrivers and ran home, excited to get the damn curtains up. Neither of these screwdrivers worked either! At least not at first - I think the main problem (other than me just being me) is that I'm not up high enough - it's hard trying to unscrew something when you're two feet too low and standing on tippy toes, losing feeling in your arms from stretching up in the air. Finally got one nail out and put on one curtain, which took me about 20 minutes because I was struggling to pull the rod out enough to get it on, one curtain holder at a time. I decided to try standing on my desk to get to the other side. I was wary of this, because I put the desk together myself and was not very confident in its sturdiness, but dammit, it held me just fine (*rare proud moment*.) I got the other screw out easy as pie because I was tall enough. And of course, this is when the entire rod fell out. DOH! I had stupidly and needlessly struggled with the other curtain when I could have taken the whole thing off. So getting the second one on was easy.....but putting the curtain rod back into place and screwed in was something else. I'm sadly going to be sore tomorrow. (Very pathetic, I know). ONE HOUR LATER, I have curtains up! Yay! I love them, so that's something!

But I'm going to have to go through all this again in the living room too? *Sob* Can you imagine if I tried to do something in my apartment that actually required skill, if I had this much trouble hanging curtains? Very sad....though I swear a little step ladder would help my sad self out a lot I think...

If only I had some 8-foot tall friends ;-)