The greatroom is now finished--in an alarmingly symmetrical fashion. I'm sure this is something that would make any decorator gnash his teeth and dance around in infuriated circles. Fortunately the only decorator we can afford is me. A real one is unlikely to ever set foot in here, so we can thus save him all the fuming and fussing.

I'm not sure I would have deliberately gone for perfect symmetry, but the room is so oddly shaped, and we had such unique needs for it--things just kind of worked out that way.

The little couch covered with pillows is actually another plywood bench similar to the window seat. It covers the wires for all the electronics (which currently number in the thousands, and I'm pretty sure are multiplying as we speak) and the cabinets contain all the TV viewing machines to keep them out of sight. The way it's set up now, we can put the screen up, and the room's focal point is a cute little couch, and not a massive TV screen. I don't like for the TV to dominate a room unless I'm actually watching it.

So the setup is a bit weird but we like it. On that note--remember how I predicted correctly that the window seat would be the dog seat of choice? I further predict that this will be the Helena Seat, for it is soft and has prettier pillows.

Here you can see how it looks with the screen pulled down. That's kind of an overwhelming TV.

The cabinets were a headache because they had to be big enough to put all the machines in, but still be lower than the bottom of the screen when it's pulled down. That's a lot harder to manage than it sounds. There was very little out there short of custom work, but I did manage to find something at a decent price in the end.

I thought the bench seat afforded rather a nice view of the balcony.

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