The Psychology of Nice Things

Our bed (headboard, footboard and rails) was delivered today. It's gorgeous! I submit to you:

I'm deeply, deeply in love with this bed (and the other furniture - some of which is partly viewable in this photo). In fact, it inspired the oft-skipped (or rather always-skipped) making of the bed, and a lot more cleaning than I usually do.

It's funny, but the bedroom stuff is really inspiriing us to keep things cleaner. (We've had some of the set for about a month, some more of it for a week.) I want the pretty wood to show. I don't want the nifty little embellishments piled under a stack of junk. Look at it - it's beautiful!

The gorgeousness of the bed greatly reduced the pouting when the bed that matched the rest of the set wouldn't fit up our staircase - a tight squeeze:

Anyway, photographic digression aside, it's pretty stuff. And rather than thinking that's frivolous (as I used to), I'm starting to appreciate the psychology of nice things.

We invested almost two thousand dollars, after all was said and done, in that bedroom set. Our previous expenditures on furniture have been pretty modest - we have a Sleep Number bed that goes for about that much, but I got it on employee discount back when I was a sales professional for them back in Colorado, which was... a ridiculously substantial discount. Close behind that was our $400 couch. All of the rest has been $10-$80 stuff from Walmart, Target and thrift stores. Now, the stuff from thrift stores looks pretty good - I wouldn't have dropped money on used furniture unless it looked nicer than new stuff at that price point. But the basic white or black or (gag) brown pressboard assemble-at-home shelving units and cabinets and stuff? It's just... ugly. It's uninspiring. It invites clutter, because there's nothing to make you care about it.

We're not the tidyest people in the world. Sue us. Life happens and we don't always have the time to pick up after it. Our studio apartment was atrocious. No, make that disgusting. That apartment was basically the equivalent of pressboard assemble-at-home furniture, besides being too small; there was no inherent beauty to it, inspiring us to keep it clean. We still don't have a perfectly clean house, but we do ever-so-much better than we ever have anywhere else. The house is gorgeous. Our stuff is starting to match.

And it seems like the more we fill it up with stuff we actually care about, the easier it gets to keep it all nice.