What I'm really doing

Earlier this fall I signed up for a class: "Introduction to Interior Design" through Berkeley's extension program. Since then I've been driving madly up to San Franscisco one day a week, turning in homework assignments late, and reading the book well behind schedule. I am far from a model student.

And yet I now know:

• You need about 3' for a walkway between furniture & the wall.
  
• If the room looks "off," make everything symmetrical. That'll let you see what's not working.
  
• There is no standard solution to a room with a TV at one end and a fireplace at the other.
  
• It really is different when you draw it. It's different again when you draw it to scale.
  
• Balance matters. Once you draw the room, divide it into squares - and then into triangles. Sketch in the furniture on tracing paper. See?! See how it's not symmetrical and how two thirds of your belongings are crammed into a tenth of your floorspace?!
  
• This is kinda fun.
  
• I do not want to be an interior designer.
  

I'm not sure I ever thought I did want to be an interior designer, but it's an inevitable question when you take the giant step of signing up for night classes. Somewhere in the second (third?) hour of the first class, though, I realized that this is fun, but as careers go It's Just Not Me. Imagine: largely solo work, no one to delegate to, having to do your own marketing - blech. Not to mention drafting. I love scale sketches, but drafting is what happens after you're already done with the idea and just need to make it pretty. I feel about drafting much the way I feel about PowerPoint: you want me to do what?! That'll take hours. Here's a nice flowchart instead, now please just go get to work on it.

End result, though, is that I am getting out of the class exactly what I wanted: the ability to lay out a room so that it actually works, plus a few designs for custom furniture I plan to get built one of these days.

And I'm convinced that my solution for what to do with those pesky laptops + iPods + wallets + purses + cellphones + random batch of papers when you walk through the door at night and really just want to drop everything on the floor is . . . nearly perfect. Is a $995 price point too high?