Out With The Old --- 2/126

Walk: Sundance Kabuki (The Hunt)
Distance: 2 miles

One possible hazard of living alone is becoming attached to the things in your environment - so much so that you lose sight of things like shabby appearance or just don't care.  Such is the case with my 13 year old deck furniture that has withstood numerous storms, heat waves, cat claws, city grime in its 24/7 life on my deck.

Here's what it looks like:

Pretty cute yes?

Here it is a little closer:

 Notice the arm and cushion.

Now here they are even closer:


The cushions (all of them) are soiled, hopelessly dirty and, even worse, the coating on all the pieces has either delaminated already or is just sort of balanced on the surface and flicks off at the slightest touch.

In other words it is (and has been for several years) just fine - not extravagant or anything -to replace this furniture.  And finally tomorrow I will do that - with very nice furniture from an old time and excellent patio furniture manufacturer.  The new will look lovely and be the highest quality but come tomorrow I'm sure I'll be devastated.  I will miss the curlicues that seemed too froufrou when my friends the present furniture arrived.  I'll forget about the grime, the peeling surface, the comments from my cleaning girl and gardener and others about 'maybe it's time for new cushions, and maybe you could repaint the furniture.'  For an undetermined amount of time I will have no idea how I could have made the horrible mistake of getting rid of this 'wonderful' 'old friend' furniture.

Apparently virtually everybody does this decorating misremembering.  I may have already told CIWT that I once worked for a decorator to some of the 'rich and famous' of San Francisco.  As is often the case with decorators, she also socialized with these people and many times would run into them at parties just after their new furnishings had arrived.  At first she would go over to them to 'share their excitement.'  But she stopped doing this because consistently the response she would get was "I hate it!  I never should have done it!  What was I thinking!"

So then the decorator would see these same people at another party a few months later and go over to apologize and commiserate.  This time the response was "Why would I be sorry?  I Love my new look. Just love it!"  She shared all this with me in case I went on in the field - which I didn't after seeing all the tension and nastiness involved - but I'm glad I'm armed with this information so will have some grip on the tailspin I'll probably be in tomorrow....