J Segal Design- Design a Life

American cherry. Quarter-sawn oak. Antique barn wood. Charcoal, blue-grey, deep green, midnight blue. A Tweed sofa, sand colored walls. Black accents. Rigorous geometry. Brushed metal. These masculine terms increasingly describe the decor of my current place. Lately I find myself drawn to certain ideas generally associated with the way men think of design. Not that there's anything wrong with it, as Seinfeld might say. Having decorated more than a few homes in the past, I confess the result was often anything but masculine. I even once had a pink bedroom. I just liked the color. It occurred to me recently when I replaced the basic beige carpet with dark distressed oak-look vinyl plank floors just how masculine my place looks. My typical 60s apartment has dark plywood doors, and plywood cabinets until recently. The layout is rectilinear; the details plain. No flourishes, just order. Yeah, I changed the floor, updated the kitchen a bit, built a headboard from the dis...

I went to Goodwill today. Not to shop, but to donate. This isn't a commercial for Goodwill, though I certainly enjoy shopping there. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what their mission is. Something about helping people. That's cool. Truth is I just have too much stuff. As you may know, I recently moved from a big suburban house to 1 bedroom apartment. In the process I purged tons of furniture and decor. Some I sold (for pennies on the dollar) and some I just sent off to the landfill. Some I placed in storage with the plan to sort thru and purge enough so I didn't need a storage locker after a month or 2. A couple items I posted online just never sold. Case in point: 2 wooden cafe chairs, $19. Every few days I get the message, “still available?” on Facebook Marketplace. Then nothing more. No follow-up. No lowballs. No detail questions. So today when the inquiry came in, followed by radio silence, I decided I'd had enough. I went to the storage lock...

I get lonely sometimes. Recently, I got so lonely that I was literally going to buy somebody a car so they could visit me. Luckily, the guy selling the car saved me from myself. You see, he was a chicken-shit. I saw a good used car on Facebook Marketplace and inquired about it. The seller turned out to be a used car salesman at a dealership, though he didn’t say so in the ad. Mistake one. When I realized he was a dealer, he said, “So I guess that means you’re not interested.” Mistake two. Why would I contact him if not interested? A salesman should never assume “NO” unless the customer says NO. To his credit, he did close me for an appointment. 9am the next morning. Then 1800-GotJunk bumped up their appointment at my place to 7am. So I’d probably not be free to make the 9am. I didn’t want to just not show- I’ve been in sales, and I hate no-shows- so I asked the salesman to bring the car to me. Here’s my address, I can’t get away for too long, but I want to see the ...

My Changing Attitude About Stuff There’s a flea market in my area I’ve been wanting to check out, but its only open on Saturday and Sunday. Last Saturday I was in the area, so I dropped in. And my attitude on stuff has been forever changed. Recently I went from huge house to small apartment, so in purging I was fascinated by how nothing I had was worth anything. Worse yet, nobody wanted my castoffs even at pennies on the dollar. The flea market is this, but at a massive scale. Everywhere I went, eager and not so eager vendors displayed their wares- most of which were just somebody else’s castoffs. Everything seemed to be useless, worn out or cheap- I mean of low quality. And the trick seemed to be to not make eye contact with the vendors, lest they see how little I wanted anything there. Seriously, I didn’t want anything I saw there. I don’t even know what I was doing there. Even after multiple purges, I still have so much junk that areas of my place are piled to the c...

Its All About Me. I Need To Remember That. Sitting at my kitchen table eating breakfast is an exercise in design that doesn’t work. Not for me anyway. Worse yet, its my own fault. I designed it. In my tiny kitchen, I had this idea that I could add an island, and that it could have fold-down sides to expand it for multiple people. No problem so far, right? My previous place had a beloved round pine table that I had built. The new place is just too small to have a table and chairs in the room full-time, so the island lifts off its 6 inch base and folds out to become a round-ish 30 inch high table when guests are here and I have folding chairs stuffed in the closet to accommodate that use. The problem is that the fold-down parts knock into my knees, the tile ends between the front and back legs- slightly different floor heights- and the stool I use is always in the way when I cook. The folding chairs come crashing down whenever I access the closet and worst of all I HAVE ...