I got my living room back for about five good minutes the other day.

Our living room is very comfortable and cozy. In a strictly technical sense (in real esate terms) it is the "formal" living space in the house, since our family room with the TV and the exercise equipment is downstairs in our snazzy basement. But there's very little formal about it.

The furniture is garnet red. We had to throw out most of our furniture when we left California. The NoCal dust had just ruined it, and we knew that most of it was so inexpensive in the first place that it woudn't survive a second 2,000 mile move. So, we started fresh in the living room here, for the most part.

I sat on quite a few couches and chairs before we picked this furniture out. Comfort was key, and clean lines, and inviting shapes. And color. Lots of color. My living room furniture (sofa, loveseat, chair, ottoman) is covered in garnet red sueded microfiber, which is great stuff. It's durable, soft, comfortable, and cleans up fairly easily. The color is fabulous against khaki walls.

The rest of the furniture is a mish-mash of tables that are old and tables that are new, some carefully placed lamps, and musical instruments. We keep OEH's french horn there, and WG's flutes, and CTA's guitar. On one wall hangs a rack of mountain dulcimers, hand-made by OEH. The oldest piece in the house is his grandmother's drop-leaf bridge table, the kind that opens up so that cards can be stored within. The coffee table came in a box. WG and I put it together one rainy afternoon in CA in 1999.

I'm kind of a candle-freak, so there are candles everywhere: on the mantle, on every table, on the bookshelf. Otherwise, it's a very simple room. The fire place is cream-city brick, not the very popular slate or marble that you will find in fancier houses.

It's the perfect room for a Christmas tree. Not a big tree, but our old faithful artificial tree we've put up every year except the first two we were married. With white lights and our very eclectic collection of ornaments, it fits the style of the room perfectly.

We did the big switch-over on Monday; now all the decorations are back in the storage room in the basement, having done their duty for another year. I managed to buy only a very few things to add to the collection between Christmases 2004 and 2005, and we did "retire" a few things to make room in the boxes.

The room looked kind of sparse for about 2 hours. Then WG and OEH went to the fabric store. Her art supply motherlode on Christmas day inspired her to take up sewing, you see. She decided to make a dress to wear to the Winter Dance later this month. The room now looks as if the local JoAnn's store exploded in it. Pattern pieces, fabric scraps, bobbins, and pins cover my beautiful garnet red sueded microfiber. The cleaning crew and I will be picking errant threads out from between the sofa cushions for weeks.

I have to out myself as a bit of a neat freak. Ordinarily this is the kind of thing that would drive me a little crazy, this uncontained chaos. But I'm trying a new thing this week. I'm going to just turn over the space to her creativity for a while longer. I'm going to live with this chaos, or at least try to.

In three or four years, my chaotic children will be gone. I'll clean then.