The filthy truth

Do you know why, in war movies, soldiers smear mud on their faces before engaging the enemy? Because it makes them invisible.

Dirt has magical properties. We can't see it. It can be right in front of us, and we look past it or around it or right through it without registering the thought, "Hey, it's dirty in here."

Oh, we can see filth when it's layered on really thick, such as in a service station restroom. Then we get all prissy about it, tiptoeing and making faces and acting like our bathroom at home is always, always spotless. It's easy to get on your high horse when the cleanup is someone else's problem.

But most of us have dirt right in our own homes. Tons of it. Grit and grime and dust bunnies. Windborne sand dunes and tracked-in mud and a fine powder of pollen over everything. It's no wonder so many of us suffer from allergies.

Right now, you're probably thinking: This guy's way off base. My house is perfectly clean. To which I reply: Hahaha on that. Even the best-kept homes have dust bunnies hiding in out-of-the-way corners.

If you don't believe me, conduct this simple experiment. Go to the heaviest piece of furniture in your house -- the piano, say, or that stuffed-full dresser in your bedroom -- and move it out from the wall. Once you recover from the strain, check out the floor where the furniture stood.
Disgusting, right? Doesn't it make you want to rearrange all the furniture and clean under it immediately? OK, maybe not, but it does give you an inkling of what kind of filth you're harboring in your home.

Most of us reach a sort of uneasy peace with hidden dirt: We can't see it, so it must not exist. Better to think that way than to spend every spare moment scrubbing stuff. We've got important TV to watch.

But once in a while, harsh reality rears its ugly head. We move a piece of furniture or investigate a strange smell or look under a bed and we see that, omigod, we live like pigs.

This happened at our house when we hired a crew to paint our home's interior while we were away on vacation. This seemed like the perfect scenario. We'd come home from a week away, and our house would be dazzlingly clean and fresh.

Not so much. The paint looked great, and the painters had been careful to cover all of our stuff so they didn't get paint on it. But in the process of painting, they'd moved all the furniture around, freeing the hidden filth.

Holy dust mites, Batman. It took the whole family a full day of vacuuming and dusting and wiping stuff before we could, once again, persuade ourselves that it was clean around here. Clean enough, anyway. The dirt had slipped back into its invisible form, waiting for the next time someone moves a sofa to reveal grime and stray popcorn and loose change.

Once again, we'd reached a standoff in the war on dirt. At least we didn't have to smear it on our faces.

Lesson learned

If you need more variety and excitement in your life, you should rearrange the furniture in your home. For even more excitement, try walking around in the dark after you've rearranged the furniture.

Furniture shopping tips

Move every few years, and you regularly face the need to adapt existing furniture to new spaces. You end up with strange combinations, or matching pieces in different rooms, or stuff stacked in the garage, awaiting use in future homes.

This migratory pattern has given rise to a popular home-furnishing style known as "eclectic." Eclectic (from the French for "mismatched bookshelves") means furniture purchased for previous houses, rearranged to fit current needs.

Furnishings put our personal history on display, and "eclectic" style lets us show just how haphazard our lives have been. This is how you end up with a hula-girl lamp on top of an antique commode, next to a waterbed, all sitting on a colorful rug apparently purchased that drunken night on the Mexican border. You accumulate such items over time. Like tattoos.

Eventually, you land someplace where you'll stay awhile and your thoughts turn to new furniture, maybe some that matches, maybe some that doesn't wobble or have big butt-dents in the cushions.

(The previous paragraph does not apply if you are a "guy." Guys don't care about butt-dents. Guys have two thoughts about furniture: 1) Is it arranged so that I can get to bed in the dark, drunk, without falling over something and breaking an elbow? And 2) Is my chair lined up directly in front of the TV?)

The problem with furniture shopping, as with most shopping, is sifting through too many choices. Too many weird products and funny brand names and unfamiliar terms like "eclectic."

We're here to help. Clip the following Furniture Glossary and take it with you when you hit the stores.

Furniture Styles and What They Mean:

Early American -- Spindly.

Primitive -- Splintery.

Santa Fe style -- Primitive, but brightly painted.

Country style -- Primitive, with gingham touches.

Mission style -- Nothing to do with the missionary position, so stop smirking. Square, wooden, uncomfortable.

Colonial -- Uncomfortable furniture designed by people who had the fashion sense to wear large buckles on their hats.

Contemporary -- Uncomfortable.

Modern -- Uncomfortable, with sharp edges.

Art Deco -- Uncomfortable, but shiny.

Shaker -- Uncomfortable, but in a penitential way.

Adirondack -- Uncomfortable, made of planks.

Mediterranean -- Wrought-iron.

Scandinavian -- Blond.

French Provincial -- Furniture with fancy epaulets.

Bombe -- Furniture with goiters.

Chippendale -- Elaborate furniture designed by male strippers.

Other Handy Terms:

Overstuffed -- Designed for fat people.

"Pottery Barn" style -- Designed for skinny people who live in apartments.

"Pier One" style -- Designed for Margaritaville.

Retro -- Old.

Antique -- Really old.

Rustic -- Really old and badly constructed.

Refurbished -- Old and broken.

Floor model -- New and broken.

Distressed -- Broken on purpose.

Ready-to-Assemble -- So broken that it comes as a box of loose parts, some of which are missing.

Now that you know the terms, you're all set to go shopping! Furnish your house exactly the way you want!

Just in time to move again.

House abuse

A new home is the biggest investment most of us make in our lifetimes, yet we regularly let others slash its value, right under our very noses.

I'm speaking here, of course, of our children.

We wouldn't let our kids play around with our stock certificates or our banking paperwork, but we let them run amok in our houses, doing so much long-term damage, we'll be lucky to make our money back when it comes time to sell.

Yes, the children have to live somewhere. And, yes, they're our responsibility, at least for the first 18 to 27 years. And yes, they don't mean to wreck the place and diminish its resale value.
But accidents happen: Boot holes in sheetrock. Bloodstains on carpet. Ceiling fans pulled out of their fittings by "Tarzan." Exploded toilets. The occasional small fire.

Turn some kids loose in your home and it will be transformed from a domestic showplace into a scuffed, scratched, soda-saturated dump faster than you can say "Martha Stewart." And your investment will be ruined.

Such damage has been much on my mind since we moved to a nearly-new house a few years ago. Our previous homes had been battle-scarred veterans that were well past retirement age. Perfect places, really, for rearing two boys. What was another spill, another chip in the plaster? It gave the house "character."

(This fit with our evolving philosophy on furnishings as well. Before the boys were born, we liked old cabinetry and rickety tables, items picked up in antique shops. But once we had kids, our house became the Place Where Antiques Go to Die. We wised up, and started buying heavy-duty furniture, stuff that could take a beating, with upholstery that would disguise spills and other forms of "character.")

But our latest house came to us in pristine condition, which meant I became a nervous wreck.
Our sons ran through the house, wrestling and crashing and throwing things, all the while dripping chocolate ice cream on the beige carpet, and I anxiously scurried along behind them, begging them to be careful.

The boys call such rambunctious behavior "horseplay." I see it as undercutting our investment.
Look, I tell them, we won't live in this house forever. Given the vagaries of career relocations and the yo-yo real estate market, we'll eventually sell the place. If nothing else, we parents will want something smaller when they go off to college. All of us must take care of the current house so that, someday, we'll get our investment to pay off.

My sons listen carefully to these explanations, nodding along, agreeing with every word. Then they race off to the other end of the house, crashing and wrestling, juggling ice cream and setting small fires.

I try to ignore the noise, but then I'll hear a loud thud against a wall. Or the violent slamming of a cabinet door. Or the thunder of oversized sneakers and the lightning of malicious laughter. Or the startling clank of a dropped toilet seat.

(Why, oh why, must they always slam the toilet seat? Are they mad at it?)

I'm on my feet in a flash, hustling to the other end of the house to put a stop to the playful destruction. The boys will pronounce me "no fun," but they'll halt their house abuse. Then I can go back to the sofa, confident I've protected our investment. Until the next thud/crash/clank/slam.

I'll definitely need to invest in a smaller place by the time the kids go off to college. I think they call it a "padded cell."

Room to grow

The latest "hot trend' in home design reflects perfectly our modern, pell-mell, multi-tasking, cell-phone-gabbing way of life.

Look at home magazines and real estate ads and you'll see how designers now construct every room with three or four uses in mind. For example, a kitchen will also be a laundry and an office and a hobby center and a conversation pit built around a fireplace. And there'll be a TV hidden in the cabinetry.

These ingenious designs make use of every square foot of space in the house by using the latest technology: stoves that are also refrigerators, washing machines that are also dryers, microwave ovens that are also X-ray machines, beds that fold into walls, desks with built-in bars. Every nook and cranny of every floor plan these days is crammed with a computer station and a telephone.

Such designs allow us to do many things at once, which is the way we live. We work in bed and eat in the den and phone from the kitchen and sleep in the office. And everyone else in the family is running around like crazy, trying to do everything at once, too. This is why, when you call your friends, you can always hear in the background a TV yapping and a toilet flushing and something sizzling on the stove.

Most of us don't live in houses specially designed with multiple uses in mind. Older homes have your standard arrangement of rooms and cabinets and electrical sockets, so we have to furnish and shape these rooms to fit our needs. This is how reclining chairs end up in breakfast nooks and toy boxes get tucked into bathroom corners. It's why the accent piece in every room is a tangle of gray computer cables.

Traffic patterns, comfort preferences and time conflicts dictate where people congregate and where we put our stuff and where we find quiet nooks where we can avoid the rest of the family. And that requires using rooms in ways that weren't intended.

Hasn't the kitchen always doubled as meeting hall? Whenever you host a party, doesn't everyone gather in the kitchen, noshing and yakking and leaning on counters and resting their elbows in sticky, days-old spills?

At our house, the laundry room doubles as an entrance, the living room has a desk in one end and a piano in the other, the foyer acts as closet space. The master bedroom is essentially a book-jammed library with a bed in it. The kids' rooms are toy storage facilities/disaster areas.
Then there's the "great room." This oversized room combines dining room, den, my home office, sunroom, gym and entertainment district into one cluttered, multi-use, feng-shui-free zone.
The room has big windows with a southern exposure, which means that this time of year, it also becomes a greenhouse. My wife likes houseplants, so there's always several flowering on the window sills. But this summer we fixed up our patio -- another Southwestern necessity -- and she went a little overboard at the nursery, until you couldn't see the patio for the trees.

When nights started getting cold, many of these plants needed to come indoors, so naturally she put them all in the sunniest room. My office/den/dining room now overflows with flora. The room currently has 29 plants, ranging from three inches to eight feet tall.

I'm not complaining. The plants are beautiful and she's arranged them nicely and they're pumping oxygen into our cooped-up indoor air. But they're crowding me a little.

My wife may have a green thumb, but I don't. I'm afraid to get near houseplants. Past experience has taught that if I water, move, touch or breathe on them, they'll expire within minutes. If I look at one too hard, it's the kiss of death.

With so many plants and potted trees around, I must skirt them when I walk and avoid them when I choose a place to sit and avert my eyes if one of them notices me. Because of this constant evasion, I move around the room like a nervous geek trying to do the samba.

And why shouldn't I be nervous? It's a jungle in here.

(Editor's note: In our current home, we have an actual office, separate from every other use. It's full of plants.)

Freedom to assemble

Want to chill the typical American male to his very toes? Then utter these three simple words: "Some assembly required."

Furniture and bicycles, toys and stereos, computers and exercise equipment all arrive at our homes these days requiring final assembly. And the average male gets out his tools and muddles through the "instructions" and proceeds to break whatever item he's supposed to be assembling.

This average male is thinking the whole time: "Don't they have someone more qualified to do this? Isn't there someone at the factory who knows how to do the final assembly?" Sure, the furniture (or other item) needs to fold flat for shipping, but wouldn't we all be happy to pay higher shipping costs to get the item in its finished form?

I'm sure some guys love the challenge of "ready-to-assemble" furniture and color-coded computer cables and toys in which the battery compartment is hermetically sealed, but I'm not one of them. And I think most guys fall into my category: Irredeemable klutzes who have no business assembling anything.

We klutzes know who we are. We'd never attempt to, say, create a piece of furniture from scratch. We know we're not gifted with the innate ability to handle tools properly. We stay away from power saws because we don't want the nickname "Stumpy."

But give us a piece of furniture compacted into a three-inch-thick box, and we're gung-ho. After all, the parts are all there, right? The holes are pre-drilled. The box contains instructions written in some semblance of English. Why, any fool could put it together!

Soon, though, we find that we're not just any fool. We're the fools who can't do anything right, the ones for whom "some assembly required" might as well read, "Forget about it, you idiot."

To be fair, it's not entirely our fault. Ready-to-assemble items rarely are truly ready to assemble. If there were truth in advertising, they'd be labeled: "Random assortment of parts that may or may not fit together. You're on your own."

Murphy's Law is hardly adequate to describe the pain and suffering faced by a guy who's trying to "insert tab 'A' into slot 'B' at a 45-degree angle." Here, then, are Brewer's Laws for Ready-to-Assemble Items:

--Tab "A" never fits into slot "B." There's always a ragged piece of plastic that prevents them from sliding together smoothly. Remove that excess plastic, and the tab will wiggle loosely in its slot. Forever.

--Instructions are written in pidgin English by someone from a foreign land, even if the item is labeled "Made in the USA." The foreign land that produces such writers is "Venus."

--Illustrations in the instructions will be so tiny, you won't be able to tell which part goes where without a microscope.

--No matter how carefully you handle the plastic bag full of nuts, bolts, screws and washers, you'll lose at least one of them. The missing hardware will be the one piece of that holds everything else together.

--Missing screws, etc., will be some oddball size they don't carry at American hardware stores.

--Yes, ready-to-assemble furniture comes with pre-drilled holes to make it easier to line up the pieces, but one of the holes will be in the wrong place. It won't be off by much; just enough to make you slowly go insane.

--If tools such as Allen wrenches are included with the hardware, they'll be made of flimsy metal that just begs to be broken. And, they'll be too small to use with your actual hands. If you try to use real tools in their place, the tools will not fit. The next sound you hear will be the stripping of a bolt.

--When pieces don't fit, you'll eventually get mad and try to force them. This will result in permanent damage, both to the item and to your fingers.

--If you succeed in assembling the item, there always will be a few screws, etc., left over. These parts should be discarded immediately before your wife sees them.

Remember these rules when faced with "some assembly required." They won't make it any easier, but they'll remind you that someone, somewhere, is getting a good laugh at your expense.
My money's on those Venusians.

Planet of the japes

You want to buy new living-room furniture, but you just can't justify the expense. The old stuff's really not worn out yet. If only there were a way to accelerate the wear-and-tear, so you could bring yourself to get rid of the old furniture faster. . .

Here's the solution: Run right out and rent the videotape of "Planet of the Apes," the PG-13 version with all the scary soldier-apes leaping around like, well, like monkeys. Screen this video for your children. They will respond by becoming monkeys themselves, screeching and scratching themselves and, most importantly, bounding around on the furniture. In no time at all, the old stuff will be trashed and you'll be free to purchase stylish new furnishings for your home.

Kids are rough on furniture because they don't get the whole concept. They look at a sofa, for instance, and they don't see a place to sit and be comfortable and eat Fritos. They see a trampoline. Or a pirate ship. Or the battlements of a castle. It is their duty, as children, to jump on sofas and to fling themselves off the backs of armchairs and to stand on glass-topped coffee tables.

Exposing them to simian behavior only makes these tendencies worse. You wouldn't put a fine leather sofa in a gorilla cage, would you? Take a look at your children. Are they any different from apes? Do they treat the furniture any better than gorillas would? I didn't think so. Then you'd better not invest a lot of money in new furniture, not until the kids go off to college to destroy the furnishings in some dorm.

When I was a kid, my mother constantly exhorted my brother and me to sit properly on the furniture. We responded by doing backflips off the sofa and wrecking kitchen chairs while building "forts." When something inevitably broke, my poor mother would moan, "We can't have anything NICE."

Which, when you have children, is exactly right.

In those idyllic child-free days of our marriage, before my wife and I had two sons, we filled our house with antiques -- 100-year-old tables and carved-wood chairs and frilly sofas much too delicate for a big guy like me to actually sit on. Once the boys came along, that furniture bit the dust, item by item, as seats wore out and upholstery tore and arms broke (the furniture's, not the children's). All that beautiful furniture, which had endured generations of wear, couldn't survive our kids. We began calling our home The Place Antiques Go to Die.

Replacement furniture tends to be of the overstuffed, rugged variety. (You know you're a real parent when the best selling point for a new couch is that the upholstery "won't show dirt.")
A few antiques -- tables and cabinets that don't make good battleships -- still remain, mixed in with the padded, Scotch-Guarded stuff. The resulting style is what home magazines call "eclectic," which comes from the French for "mismatched."

Eventually, I suppose, we'll just get rid of the sofas and chairs altogether in favor of bookshelves and desks and rolling chairs. More and more at our house, room once given over to antiques and decorative items has become workspace. I've got a desk, my wife's got a desk, all God's children got desks.

In their bedrooms, both sons were using old folding tables for computer desks, so we got them new desks for Christmas. Very nice, heavy-duty stuff that came "ready-to-assemble" (ha!) and was guaranteed with full warranty for six years (haHA!). The desks have lots of shelves and pigeonholes to hold the boys' endless supply of "stuff." Their granddad cooperated by building them spacious new bookshelves for Christmas as well.

We got everything installed, computers reconnected, "stuff" stored. My wife and I, weary but happy, stood in the bedroom doorway, admiring our handiwork, which looked awfully well-organized if a little sterile.

A realization hit me and I turned to her and said, "We've built office cubicles for our sons."

She replied grimly, "They might as well get used to it."

This, as you might imagine, took the edge off our Christmas spirit. But it didn't bother the boys. They were too busy climbing on their new desks, scratching and hooting and turning backflips.