(Re)Arrange Your House with Twitter: Mid-Experiment Update

Cristina and Lisa have been tweeting (or Twittering, or using Twitter) for a whole week, and they have been fantastic. The regularity and quality of their tweets have been exceptional, so I think I can already glean some juicy information on their lifestyle, the flow of their day, as it were.

First off, some stats:

Cristina:

• total updates: 193
• from computer: 192 (either from Twitter.com or Twitterfox)
• from iPhone: 1 (Twitterific)

Lisa:

• total updates: 101
• from computer: 81 (either from Twitter.com or Twitterfox)
• from iPhone: 20 (Twitterific)

As you can see, they both did a great job!

Cristina’s Life Flow

• The morning ritual seems well fixed and harmonious with her usual tendencies. In other words, she is not expressing a need to adjust to the new environment. The order of the rooms works well for her morning routine. Up from bed, quick bathroom stop, kitchen for coffee and frugal breakfast, paper.
• The radio is a very important component of Cristina’s home life. ***Perhaps a radio system throughout the house*** [She mentions that she would like the radio to follow her from room to room].
• When she doesn’t have to go to school, she settles in her study after breakfast and takes care of email and Skype calls to her family in Italy — This ritual is performed with high regularity every morning. Her desk is against the far wall of the room, with the windows to her right, but she finds her body turning toward the light and says she feels like a sunflower. ***Suggestion for week 2: Experiment by putting the desk between the two windows, so she can see the sky (which she has mentioned has a meditative, soothing effect on her) and avoid glare on her computer screen.***
• Food is not a focus for Cristina, or should I say cooking. She likes to eat very healthy food, preferably a vegetarian diet, but prefers frequent small snacks to fewer larger meals. Her cooking is reduced to a minimum but she takes great pleasure in cleaning and organizing the kitchen. By the end of the first week she has set the kitchen up quite to her satisfaction. ***Note: the kitchen needs to be entirely redone, but now is not the time. This is perhaps the best that can be done in the short term.***
• It is clear to me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day for Cristina. She has tweeted more and in much more detail about her entire morning ritual, from the moment of awakening to the espresso coffee on the stove and the healthy slice of toasted bread, to the reading of the paper and listening to the radio, on to emails and Skype calls home. Her morning ritual is very important to her and it seems that this apartment is well suited to her rhythm.
• Lunch is a quick affair: if at work, takeout or a quick lunch place with colleagues, on which not much emphasis has been put. If at home, also a quick and light meal with very little fuss in the kitchen, and then back to work.
• After work hours are over, in the evening there is some relaxed computer work with perhaps the accompaniment of the television or radio, and reading in bed before sleeping.

General Observations on Cristina’s experience of her new apartment

• It is no coincidence that Cristina has chosen the top floor of her building. The light is extremely important to her. She notes that she and Lisa disagree on the color of the paint on the walls of the study, but during this week has had a revelation. Having for the first time had the opportunity to spend some time in the room, she has noted that when the sky is overcast the color of the walls merges, almost melds with the color of the sky outside, giving her a wonderful feeling of peace. ***I recommend that before any changes are made to the colors of the walls both Cristina and Lisa should experience the various feelings that different weather conditions create, with changing light and shades of sky.***
• The kitchen, while small and antiquated, is for the moment adequate. It has been fitted for a washer/dryer, which will improve the quality of their lives immensely. Cristina has quickly outfitted and configured the kitchen to fit her regimen, and she has repeatedly expressed satisfaction with the current layout. ***I recommend that when the time comes to redo some parts of the apartment, care should be taken to consider the morning flow, in particular, as that is the most important moment of the day for Cristina.***
• Not many tweets focus on the bedroom. I deduce from this that Cristina mainly uses the bedroom for sleeping, reading in bed and storing clothing, but that her emotional attachment to the room is not great. ***Since storage space is very scarce in the apartment and the bedroom seems to be used really only at night, I recommend making the most of the space in terms of storage potential, with perhaps a wardrobe and drawer or shelving combination.***

Lisa’s Life Flow

• I deduce from the tweets that the house in North Carolina is on two levels, because she tweets about “back upstairs” at one point. So, here’s how I see her morning routine: Wake up, go downstairs to make coffee, back up with coffee in hand, shower upstairs where the bedroom and master bath is, back downstairs for breakfast, and then out to work.
• During the day Lisa is very busy and had many meetings.  She doesn’t really talk about lunch, so I assume she has a quick bite while she works. Lunch is always referred to as “going to grab some lunch,” so it must be on the go.
• At the end of the work day she almost always bring work home with her. She often complains of clutter in her work space, on her desk, in her office and about needing a better filing system for her various projects and assignments. ***I suggest moving as much of her work online as possible, something like Google Docs, so she can work anywhere at all, at home and also in New York (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).***
• A very interesting characteristic of Lisa is that when she is at home in the evening or on the weekend and she is working (which she seems to be doing non-stop, seven days a week, she always sits on the floor. She speaks of leaning against the couch with a couple of cushions and mentions that more back support would be a good thing. ***Accommodations must be made in the study in New York for her work habits on the floor. There are floor cushions made for sitting, with back support, like the BackJack Chair, which folds away flat and is easy to store in between visits.***
• When at home, Lisa too listens to the radio, and in the evening likes to watch a little television.

Tentative Conclusions

1. Cristina and Lisa seem to have very compatible lifestyles, preferences and habits. Having spent only one morning with the two of them together, I had a great feeling of ease and comfort, a very nice vibe.
2. They both listen to the radio and both can have the tv in the background when they work at night.
3. Neither of them seems to spend a lot of time cooking, so the small kitchen is not too much of a drawback. And their kitchen habits seem complementary, because from what I understand when they are together Lisa does the cooking and Cristina does the cleaning up, which we already know she enjoys greatly [I love to clean the kitchen too, so I understand the feeling].
4. Neither of them spent any significant time talking about the bedroom as an important space to inhabit, so I am confirmed in my intuition that it is a good room in which to store things (storage space is very scarce in the apartment, but they do have a storage room in the basement of the building).

Tentative Recommendations

• Right after the purchase of a new home there is not a lot of money to spend on fixing the place up or renovating, so it’s important to be able to focus on what is really important.
• I would give top priority to the study, where Cristina spends most of her time and the two of them would probably spend most of their time when together. It is important for this room to have Cristina’s desk (which I have suggested she move to the wall between the two windows, experimentally, to see if she likes that position better. It should also have a rug and a few cushions and some kind of seating arrangement on the floor for Lisa. I would also put a couch in this room, perhaps a loveseat.
• I would recommend moving the television, which is currently in the position where I would put the desk, in the corner, to the left of the double glass door, so that it can be seen from the desk and also from the floor where Lisa would sit, and also from the couch, which I would put on the wall opposite the windows. I would definitely put at least one bookcase in the room, on the wall where Cristina’s desk is currently situated.
• Cristina bought a table for the dining room, and it is quite large but I think it will work out. When work overflows Cristina likes a large surface to spread out on.

For now, these are my recommendations. At the end of the two weeks I will analyze the remainder of their tweets and give room-by-room recommendations. Stay tuned for the final installment of this exciting experiment!

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Tagged as: Google Docs, New York, North Carolina, Television, Twitter