Finding a Better Way
Once the dust settled at the county fair and we realized that I had bought a huge massage chair that looks like a cross between an Eero Saarinen design and something for sale at Hammacher Schlemmer, I needed a solution. Since I was economical enough to buy a floor model (with full warranty coverage and only driven by little old ladies at the fair), I had no choice but to take a black model. After seeing the brown model, I think that was a fortunate thing. But a massage chair is not the sort of thing everyone has room for just anywhere. We have a 3,700 sf house, all on one level, so it seems bigger than it really is. I estimate that our next and final home is likely to be half that size, but that doesn’t mean we have room for a massage chair.
You have to start with the issue of the gaucheness of mechanical chairs in a home with almost any sense of style. What could be less stylistic than a living room with two Barcoloungers pointed at a big-screen TV? How about a sofa that turns into two Barcoloungers and also has a built-in mini-fridge and recharging plugs for one’s iPhone or iPad? It somehow seems less offensive if it all sits in a media room. There it seems more acceptable, but then I tend to think even having a media room is pretty gauche these days. In a strange way, I find anyone who pretends that they don’t watch TV in their living room is either pretentious or boring. We are lucky enough to have a very large living room that accommodates two sections, one for polite conversation and one for big-screen TV watching, so I can straddle the two worlds without having to pretend I don’t watch TV too much.
Where one puts a massage chair from the next millennium is a challenging task. The choices in our house are the master bedroom, the study or the living room (presumably the TV side of the room). At first, we thought the study, but with all the recent additions of gym equipment including a rowing machine and weight bench we have multi-purposed our study to the max. The only spot in the bedroom is off next to my side of the bed. That would be tight, but could work if I hadn’t already filled that space with an infrared heated pad with a chi alignment machine. Yep, I have it to help my hip joints and because Just Call Saul used one and swore by it. So, I started to figure out what I could do to move the relatively lightly-used rowing machine in the study. All it took was Kim’s suggestion that we give it away to one of her nephews for me to find a better way. It dawned on me that I would like a bit more room for my workouts than the study allowed, so I suggested we repurpose one third of the garage, which was just getting cluttered up anyway. Its a three car garage that currently houses my truck and two motorcycles as well as my electric wheelbarrow (yes, that’s another whole gadget story).
It occurred to me that the trick about owning one of these massage chairs was to put it in a place where you were likely to want to spend extended time to make the best use of it. That would not be the study for sure. Perhaps the garage with a repurposed home gym? Perhaps, but then I got a better idea. I have been less and less comfortable with my end of the custom sectional sofa we have on the TV side of the living room. It’s a chaise lounge configuration and what should be a comfy spot has turned into a hip-troubling seat. So, I tried the idea out on Kim of disconnecting my third of the sectional and moving it out to the garage to make room for my Star Wars massage chair. Funny thing…she bought it. Her rationale is that so long as we keep that chaise piece of the sectional, we can either replace it or perhaps just throw in the towel and buy a new sofa since 12 years is already a good long time for a sofa…even a custom one that’s in great shape. If I thought Kim was devious, I might suspect a play for a new sofa, but that’s not her style. She just wants me to be comfortable and she knows I am uncomfortable on the chaise and that I really liked the massage chair, especially for its affect on my ankles.
So, today we set the plan in motion since the massage chair arrives and is installed on Sunday. We spent the morning cleaning out the garage, something that was overdue and, in and of itself, felt really productive. Then I moved all of the gym equipment including the rowing machine into the cleaned out garage. I bought some more high-impact floor pads and made the right third of the garage a sweet gym with all my equipment and lots more room to maneuver. Now I really have no excuse for not working out every day. I think I even have room for the chaise sectional in there now. The study now looks like a study again and the bedroom looks like a bedroom with a heated chi alignment machine in it. As for the living room, nothing has changed yet since I am waiting for Handy Brad to come by tomorrow to help me deconstruct the sectional and move the chaise out to the garage.
As Kim and I finished our work day and showered, we realized that we felt really good about our accomplishment for the day. There is simply something very satisfying about cleaning out a garage for some strange reason. Add to that the creating of an new gym in the cleaned out garage and the reclamation of our study to its originally intended purpose and you have lots of productivity around the house today. Then came the next morning. As I sit here in the living room, trying to get out ahead of the blog beast (since I am writing much more contemporaneously these days), I am finishing this story early today and Kim has her personal trainer over for her workout. She has been using Jesse since she stopped going to the Perfect Workout. Jesse brings her variable weight dumbbells and Kim does her workout on a yoga mat on the living room floor. As she began this morning, I asked her why she isn’t using our new garage gym. She says its not air conditioned. Now, at 8am here in San Diego, even in mid-summer, that garage cannot be warmer than 75 degrees, and it has a fan if needed. That wasn’t terribly convincing to Kim, so I told her I was going out as soon as I finish this story to test out the gym temperature. Even Jesse mentioned that working up a sweat in a slightly warmer gym is not such a bad idea. I guess time will tell if my version of finding a better way will prove to be as much better as I am currently inclined to imagine.