Lamps and More Lamps!

I dream of them now... Pairs of them, matching! Free standing lamps! Table lamps! Brass lamps! And I remember how it all started...

My wife and I plan to move, and she's introducing me to the concept of "staging". Apparently you can't just clean the place up and fix a few things to sell your house anymore; you have to market it. She's been doing her homework, as she usually does, and has learned that you can't expect people to use any imagination when they look at your home. You're supposed to remove anything distinctive and make the place look fairly bland so potential buyers can imagine themselves living in it. I'm willing to take her word for it, since she's usually right about these things.

And so she's been plotting out sufficiently bland furnishings to buy and uses for them once we've moved into the new place, so they're not a waste after they've served the initial purpose. She came home late last week with two new matching lamps and explained where she plans to put them during the staging process and where they're going to go in the new house we'll eventually buy. We don't really have room for them now, so they've been occupying space on our couch some of the time, and the kitchen table the rest of the time. It's mildly inconvenient, but no big deal.

Then early this week, we came home from work and there was a box on the porch, which turned out to be another lamp, and my wife was very angry about this. Why? Because there were supposed to be two of them. I asked her about what we were going to do with these lamps, and she did in fact have answers. A day or two later, the other lamp showed up. These new lamps went immediately to their designated positions, but the ones they replaced now occupy a small additional table in the living room that my wife assures me is temporary. We have a bit less room now, but again, it's not so much a problem as to be any real issue.

I was working on Good Friday, but my wife wasn't. I came home to find a new mat out in front of the door, so I knew she'd been shopping, and immediately realized that this was likely to be trouble. I came in the house and observed that the room had, in fact, been changed in several ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the ways in which the room was different was that there were several more lamps. There was a new free standing floor lamp by the temporary table, and two more new lamps in boxes on the couch, next to the first two additions that were still sitting there. There was a new small table near the front window, but that was the only new thing in the room other than more lamps. I didn't say a word, but looked at my wife, who looked a little defensive and said "Well, two of them are for Dad's place".

She claims that it's merely a coincidence that she's been finding all of these lamps that fit into her plans at a good price over a short period, and that she has a lot of other plans for the staging process. I'm going to have to take her word for it and hope that this isn't some unique form of insanity. At least our house will be well lit...