KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

Boyfriend Pham and I don't have much in common in our daily lives. We share core principles and values though how we enact them is worlds apart, we share a love of food though mostly different foods; and our favourite colour is green - I've never asked for details but I'd assume different greens based on our history of not having much in common.

Boyfriend Pham is not one to do things by halves so when we painted our downstairs feature wall midnight blue-purple, he also painted a feature wall in our bedroom. We've binged quite a few Never Too Small videos on YouTube during the 2020-2021 lockdowns when we started to think smarter about how we use our space. He ended up buying the Never Too Small book by Joel Beath and found inspo in a tiny apartment that had a dark green wall framing balcony doors. It framed the jungle beyond the glass doors and made the view pop.

We own a mortgage debt for a humble townhouse in Brisbane and, well, let's say the previous owners or original builders did a bit of a hack job with paint colour combos. Our bedroom has four different shades of cream and beige across the walls, door, frames and skirting boards. Why?!

Boyfriend Pham plans to repaint the whole house room by room but first, he wanted to learn how to paint by doing small feature walls. His first attempt was the desk feature wall downstairs. Our bedroom was attempt two. We used a grey paint base under the forest green. The dark feature wall instantly changed the feel of the space. It's now cosy and warm and snug as we fall asleep; not beige, boring and bright.

We got new curtains that look nice... so long as you don't look down and see how we hemmed them with double-sided tape. Regrets. We wish we'd sewn the hem instead because ironing the tape ruined our rug by getting bits of glue on it, and also made the curtain hem permanently wrinkled. We did not research curtains at all compared to the weeks and months of pondering the feature wall colour and painting. Oops. We'll replace the curtains in a decade or so, I guess. How long do curtains last? I might know if I researched them. 

I adore Steve Carell. The Office kept me good company while I worked in government and realised The Office jokes were very much based on reality. But one of my favourite Steve Carell moments is from Anchorman - the I love lamp scene. This post isn't actually about my love for Steve Carell. It's about how much I love the new desk lamp that Boyfriend Pham bought for me.

I work from home 2-3 days a week and my desk nook is quite dark. It's not near the one window that would have shed light on it except for the part where it's west facing, doesn't get morning sun and the afternoon sun is blocked by our neighbours' generous garden trees. It keeps the house nice and cool through summer but also keeps the desk nook quite dark. Too dark for Zoom meetings because you can see my silhouette against a bright background and not my facial expressions.

For some reason, the downlights in the room are wired so that if I turn on the light over the desk, it turns on 3 downlights. It seemed excessive and wasteful to have them on all day while I worked on and off in Zoom. In my last role, I had a work Macbook that isn't a decade old so the camera was OK in low light. In the new and not improved Windows environment, the laptop camera and Logitech camera couldn't agree with Zoom to show my face in low light.

I mentioned this to Boyfriend Pham in passing one day and he went and found the Vivo vesa mount desk lamp that mounts to the back of the screen (instead of the cumbersome clip-on that blocks part of the screen or one that grips the desk). This means I can set and forget the lamp - it adjusts with the screen when I move the screen up and down, and doesn't block my view at all. Unlike the cat, who constantly gets in my way.