So I’m trying to write to deadline, desperately; this of course means it’s time to talk about theories of interior design!

…of which I have none. What I mean is, I tried to clean up my apartment yesterday and got totally flabbergasted, because while there’s plenty of room for the mess, there’s absolutely no space for me to get oranized.

This always makes me think of the one episode of Mission: Organization that ever impressed me, where some poor woman’s jail cell of a studio apartment got remade into an actual living space. It’s still small, and this sort of renovation only works on people who don’t own a lot of books, but I still think about it whenever I look at my living room and think, “This is a cesspool – be like that studio apartment, stupid living room!”

The Before: there’s more information about this on the website, which includes Puritan-level scathing condemnation of her slightly-cluttered chair. Seriously, they put “There’s actually a chair underneath all that stuff!” on the ACTUAL WEBSITE. There’s two books, two messenger bags, and a paper shopping bag on that chair. I should show HGTV the horrors of the chair in my living room that I call “Closet 2″.

Anyway, while the clutter factor is debatable, there’s no question this is a really bland apartment that needed help:

And boy, did it ever get help.

So the dude (who now runs Apartment Therapy) came in and whipped her apartment into shape, and seriously, it looked like it had twice the room:

And it looked that way because of the awesomelarious use of her front wall as the world’s tallest, most random bookshelf:

I can’t help but love it, even though any apartment that requires you to haul out the ladder every time you want to read one of your favorite books is already too labor-intensive for lazy-ass yours truly. Plus, my TV would take up the entire desk on the right, and the storage cubes would be the world’s most uncomfortable chairs.

So basically, this apartment does not work for me in a practical sense. However, it certainly made an impression on me (I mean sure, the wall makes no sense, but it’s a BRIGHT ORANGE SHELFWALL – hell yes!), because it was the first time I could conceive of living in a space that small.

I think about this apartment every time I look at Tumbleweed Houses, which might as well be called “Places That Freak Genevieve Out, Even As She Knows She Will Be Living in One in Twenty Years When The Sea Levels Rise And We Must All Run For Our Lives In Our Teeny Trailer Homes to Escape the Sea Monsters.” Only it’s not called that, because no one would ever type in that entire URL.

Of these, the ones that seem the easiest to live in without constant panic attacks are The Epu and the WeeBee, which at least both have light.

You know what they don’t have? Room for more than twenty books. Talk about panic attacks.