When I first moved into my new house, I immediately installed a bureau when I could afford furniture. I had been living out of plastic bins and suit cases for nearly all of college. Each year, I would move to school for the school year and then head straight home each summer, never really settling down your buying anything nice.
I remembered that when I was a little girl and had the same room for more than four months at a time, I had organized my bureau so that everything had a place and the space was neat and tidy. Since moving around so much, I had lost touch of what it was like to have so many things in one space and to have so much space for them.
I went shopping for bureaus at a local fashionable home decorating store. They had every style and size imaginable. I really wanted something long, to take up an entire wall of my apartment. At first, though, all we saw were talk bureaus and antique- looking styles.
Finally, I found what I was looking for – a two-draw wide bureau that had three smaller drawers at the top. When I got the piece of furniture in my room, it was perfect, and I was so proud to have it.
The first thing I did was organize the drawers. I divided the top three first. One drawer was a junk drawer. Since I was a kid and had my grandmother come to stay with me for two weeks while my parents were on vacation, I always had a junk drawer. My grandmother told me that they were important and should hold all the things that were important to me, but didn’t really have a place.
I divided the next two drawers between socks and underwear, but quickly realized that I had too many socks to fit in the smaller sized drawers (I like warm feet), so I made them the underwear drawer and the bra drawer.
Of the bottom four drawers, one was for pajamas, one for work-out bottoms, one for T-shirts and another for long sleeved shirts. I decided to hang everything else in the closet and think of the bureau as the place to put all of my hang-around-the-house clothes.
Now, several years later, my boyfriend lives in my house with me and we share everything – including my bureau. Because I had used all of the drawers, I’ve found that having to change has been very hard and it requires more organization than I have most days. We divide our T-shirts and everything between the two drawers and I always tend to get a little bitter with him for taking over my space.
For awhile, we tried to have a separate dresser in the room for him, but my space is too small and it just wouldn’t fit – he could never open the drawers to the dresser, so he couldn’t even really use it.
Sharing a dresser isn’t hard – it just takes patience. The good news is that we don’t feel pressured to do laundry because if we don’t have enough clothes to fill the drawers, all the better –there’s more space!