Diderot love seats

A bunch of years back, there was a dude named Denis D. who wore an old  robe around the house a lot.  It wasn't elegant, but it was kind of comfy.  He wrote,

My old robe was one with the other rags that surrounded me. A straw chair, a wooden table, a rug from Bergamo, a wood plank that held up a few books, a few smoky prints without frames, hung by its corners on that tapestry. 

His robe was kind of beat up, but that meant he didn't mind using the corner of it to mop up minor spills or fix smudges he'd made.  

My homemade Adiriondack Love Seat with wheels.  Yes!

And analogously, a bunch of years back, I made an Adirondack love seat (with wheels!) out of old fence boards. It wasn't elegant (indeed, my uncle described it and the other chairs I built as "hav[ing] just a hint of medieval torture in their looks"), but it was a great place to lounge in, in my spacious back yard.

I'd sit on this chair and read the paper, while Prewash checked out rabbits.


But Denis got a new robe, and I moved to a house with a really nice porch. And for each of us, this started a cascade. For poor old Denis, he realized that nothing in his house matched the elegance of his new robe, and so he ended up replacing all sorts of his shabbier things with fancier things. As he put it,

I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.

In fact, this idea that getting one nice new thing inspires us to extend ourselves to upgrade everything else around us -- that idea that Denis D. wrote about -- has been named in his honor the "Diderot Effect".

For Denis Diderot living in France in the late 1700's, social norms about what was "elegant" or not were much more tightly defined than in my own day and age, and for him the main way to ratchet up the elegance factor was to purchase expensive stuff.  As a result, he pinpointed the new robe as the beginning of a spiral that led him into debt.

 A hundred times along the way he calculated on his fingers the size of his fortune and had arranged for its use. And now all of his hopes have vanished; he has barely enough to cover his naked limbs.

For me, I'm fortunate to live in age where thrift shops and yard sales spew out fancy goods that are nearly free for the taking, and where a mixture of cultures and economic classes allow for a wider approach to decorative styles.   Still, the Adirondack Love Seat, up on my nice brick porch, did not belong.  (My new neighbor admitted that he'd been taken aback to see it there:  "It looked like it belongs on a beach or something", he charitably offered.   He's more tactful than my uncle).

Instead of getting a new porch seat, though (or even a "new to me" porch seat), I grabbed the jigsaw to trim the wild edges:  the planks of the love seat are now topped by initials, a candle, a flower, an eye, a mistake, a heart, an owl, and more initials.  And then, paint: bold, contrasting colors of paint, purple, orange, and green.  I'm going for the "sin boldly" form of  aesthetics.  Paint is an awesome invention, I tell you.

I am kind of in love with this chair.  I'm sitting on it right now, in fact, typing away while Prewash eats her breakfast and wags her tail at passing pedestrians. She likes to play "Titanic", putting her front feet on the porch wall, leaning out across the prow.  And I get to sit here, reading the paper and typing on my computer, watching her and my neighbors and taking in all the morning sounds, sitting on a chair that I made and painted all by myself.  Other people seem to appreciate the chair, too: I get a lot of compliments on the purple.  

The chair from the street. 
We still have a few cardboard boxes stacked up
there toward the left side of the picture.

I'm trying to be careful to not let this nice new house coerce me into a spiral of non-miserly spending.  And in spite of numerous recent trips to the hardware store and so-called-thrift shops, I feel like I've been mostly successful so far.   Thanks, Denis D., for providing cautionary (and eloquent) tales!