Want A Workout? Decorate Your Apartment

Before I was married, I had a collection of CDs that I hung on my wall. In all the various places I lived, I made sure to hang up the CDs along with the other wallhangings I had garnished over the years.

Of course, the things I hung on my walls in my teenage bedroom varied from the things I hung on my wall in the dorms. For one, I was a different person. The second reason is that in the dorms, not everything can be hung on cinder block walls. That eliminated lots of things that I normally would have brought with me.

It also upped my knowledge and cleverness of how to hang stuff on walls. I learned eventually that it is possible to hang things on cinder block walls from nails; you just have to find a hole that's already there to wedge a nail into. Also, things that are normally hung with nails can often be hung with push-pins, particularly those with a plastic head that you can grip. Push-pins have a much shorter length than nails and thus are easier to wedge into the minuscule holes of cinder blocks.

The CDs always travelled with me. I didn't have them before I moved out, but somehow AOL likes to send installation CDs to poor college students and not to teenagers. And there was a church that handed out CDs at our semesterly Religious Appreciation Day (or Figure Out What LDS Student Congregation You Belong To, because all my university experiences were in Utah). And occasionally, I'd find a music CD along the road.

All these got hung up on the wall. Sticky tacky adheres wonderfully to cinder blocks. I got the idea from a high school friend of mine, hayley_beth24, whose room was so cool and so interesting to hang in. I was thrilled when I found that Justin had a collection of wall CDs too.

So of course, our wall CDs got combined. And then he started working at Best Buy. He got a lot of CDs from work (product downloads, instructional videos), and when he bought himself a DVD recorder, he encountered a lot of mistake and dud DVDs, so those were added to the collection, too.

In every apartment we've lived in, I've put the CDs on the inside of the front door and around the door. They always made the wall seem larger, and the mirror they make was useful for one last check to make sure there was no milk on the shirt or spaghetti sauce on the chin.

The door in this apartment has panels (kinda like this) so it would be really hard to make the CDs look cool. So, I hung them in the hall today. Our tiny kitchen has a ledge along it that opens up the the living room and the hall. Cabinets hang over the ledge, and you could see, before today, all the places where previous tenants have taped posters and such on the cabinets. The tape they used peeled off the finish on the veneer of the cabinets.

Well, You can't see those marks anymore because I hung CDs in the hall. On the back of the cabinets, on the wall below the laminate ledge, and on the bit of wall above the cabinets. I set the CDs and the putty on the ledge and crouched down or climbed up to attach the CDs.

What a workout. My legs hurt after I was done. And yes, the hall looks bigger even when there's other stuff hanging in the hall.