Home decorating

Few things give me more satisfaction than simple home decorating. This has been a great delight since moving here, especially since I own very little furniture or kitchenware. Indeed, the vast bulk of my belongings are books, CDs and useless knicknacks. Actually, when I arrived, the only furniture I actually owned was my beloved treasure chest that my Dad made, full of old National Geographics.
The greatest single thing in my house is a built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, which divides up the living room to make a dining area and an entrance. It has been lovingly filled with the aforementioned books and useless knicknacks.
I've bought myself a nice dining setting, with a round extendable table and four chairs; the washing machine of last week's saga; and a bunch of assorted kitchenware. All I need now is a microwave, a full dinner set so I can actually have people over, and a bed (I'm still sleeping on a mattress on the floor, which is just as comfortable as the same mattress on a bedframe, so that can wait a while). Today, I quite awesomely got a TV cupboard for the princely sum of... nothing. See, the students who do woodwork or work-related studies or whatever make a lot of stuff they don't need, which is left in the staff room for anyone to take home. So I got a perfectly serviceable TV cupboard for free. It's a kind of ugly white, but the tapestry I got in Thailand is big enough to cover the whole thing. It's a big improvement on my previous TV stand, which was just the TV perched on a stack of old crappy books.
Lastly, I've been trying to put my yukata up on display, since it's neat and I have huge expanses of wall to cover. Yesterday I built a needlessly complicated arrangement involving a curtain rod, string, shoelaces (because the string wasn't long enough) and safety pins to hang it from one of those stick-on removable wall hooks. The whole concoction came crashing down within an hour. Today's attempt involves the yukata hanging from the same curtain rod, with an unwound coathanger re-wound around the curtain rod, then hooked onto one of those vents every house has, with the obi slung over the top. It's lasted a few hours, here's hoping it'll last a few more.