The biggest benefit of being a bachelor and having your own home is being able to use rooms for worthwhile uses. Great 20x20 room with a large bay window and a small balcony overlooking the city. Might make a nice "guest room" or "sitting room" for the married man. For the bachelor it makes the perfect home gym. A nice 24x12 room with an oak hardwood floor and built in cedar closets might make a great dressing room or closet or what-have-you for the missus. For the bachelor its the perfect place to store all the overflow car parts that don't fit in the garage. Guest bedroom? Ha! I call that the couch. Sigh. I miss my old place.
I'm not sure if this post makes me out to be a poor slob or a serial killer in the making. I have three pieces of furniture. A recliner and a Wal-Mart end table I bought for $13. It replaced the tower of pizza boxes I was using. My flat screen TV sits on a $23 dollar entertainment center I got from KMart. If I manage to bring a woman over, I kill the lights, throw blankets and pillows all over my living room and light a couple of candles because I'm romantic like that. Why do I fuck women in my living room instead of my bedroom? Because I don't have a bed. I have an air mattress that sprung a leak. I'm too lazy to find the hole in it and slap some duct tape on it. At least sleeping on the floor is good for my back. And there's a small hill of clothes in there too. The only way I can tell what's clean and what isn't is because the clean clothes are still sitting in a basket and the rest are on the floor. I dress myself by whatever is on the top of the clean pile. Hurray for the color black and it's ability to hide wrinkles. My toilet seat never leaves the sitting position. Ever. My shower doubles as a urinal. The plus side is that I don't have to clean up the pool of collected piss that inevitably shows up on the bottom of the toilet. The only food I keep in my pantry is Top Ramen. My breakfast this morning was a can of chicken noodle soup. I ate the noodles, filled up the can with water and drank it out of the can. No, I didn't even bother warming it up. I'm moving at the end of the month to a new apartment that's actually nice looking. And I'm getting furniture. Maybe I'll even buy a bed.
One of my old roommates found out the hard way that bed frames exist for a reason - they make it harder for rats to climb up onto your face while you sleep. Several years ago I was living in a slummy apartment on a dead end street just north of downtown Austin. It was very convenient to be so close to everything, and my rent was only $275 a month, but unfortunately I got what I paid for. My roommate and I were not the cleanest people in the world, but our neighbors put us to shame. On one side of us was a hoarder, and living above us was a woman and her son who apparently never learned to clean up after themselves. Moldy, gelatinous stains of old pudding covered the carpet, the counter tops were slimy, and roaches crawled everywhere. Our apartment building was a haven for vermin. One morning my roommate (who slept with his mattress on the floor) told me he had a strange dream about a mouse crawling on his face. Shortly afterward, I started finding large pieces of rat shit scattered around the apartment. Fortunately, this was fairly close to the end of our lease. When my roommate was clearing out the living room in preparation for his move, he told me a huge black rat ran out from behind the entertainment center and out the front door. Was that what crawled on his face that one night, making him have that strange "dream"? I don't know, but I've always kept my bed elevated, and now I always will.