For a while I’ve been bugging Bj to get rid of our TV. He’d want me to get rid of something and I’d throw back a, “well how about you get rid of the TV?” knowing that then I wouldn’t have to get rid of whatever it was he was talking about. It’s not that I never watch it, I have a few shows, but my kid goes to be early at ten (last night 11:30… ugh!) so that doesn’t leave a lot of time for TV watching. I thought the living room would be much more useful without the TV, because we could arrange it however we wanted, not just to stare at one wall. Well something came over Bj a few weeks ago and he decided I was right and it should go. And last weekend he was digging around our basement storage room and found this old thing rolled up and put it in our garage sale pile. I saw it and remembered something I had forgotten about for years!

This map! A vintage old world classroom map. I bought this thing at a nearby estate sale a few years ago. I think it was half off day because the sticker still on it said $20 and I don’t think I would have paid that, pretty sure it was only $10. I brought it home, snuck it downstairs and stashed it in the corner of the basement where it slowly got wedged between a wall and shelf unit and I forgot about it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it. I did. That’s why I had to buy it even though I had no place for it! I brought it upstairs once it was found again and begged Bj to hang it for me. He was so NOT sold on the idea of this on the wall, but I told him we could just put it up until the garage sale and if he still hated it then we could maybe sell it. I may  have whispered the maybe part.
As I mentioned above with out the TV the furniture can go (almost) anywhere in our living room. So we rearrange, we repurposed, and I’m sewing up a storm to redecorate . I need some dry days to paint the train table and I need to find a perfect orange bowl (according to my mom). Once all that is done I’ll show you the whole thing. Here is what it looked like about a month ago, we’ll call this the before.

And I don’t want to seem like a complete luddite. I’m addicted to my iPhone, we get three Netflix discs at a time, and I know about Hulu. I like Bones way too much, even when I don’t want to and So You Think You Can Dance is one of my favorite things about summer. But with the whole room basically being about television and Tuesday’s awareness about it becoming greater and greater I felt like we could do without this screen. We have a computer, and the projector I show my client’s photos on can be used as a TV. We actually got rid of cable a while ago for an antenna (free TV!) which helped the whole “just having the TV on because” thing (anyone else get hooked into marathons of How it’s Made or anything on HGTV?). So we were down to a handful of channels. I am MUCH more mindful of really wanting to spend my time watching something vs. doing something now. It’s been a few (three?) weeks and I’m not missing it. Go ahead and call me crazy (yes, we know, we have been told). I think it’s going to work. Bj has assured me that if it doesn’t we’ll just get a bigger one, ya right Beeg!!!