My friend, the plywood wall
Inspired by NoPO Volume 1: page 118
One of my favorite questions to ask people is “What is in your starter pack?” In all the years I’ve been asking this to friends, family members, strangers… the most interesting–and honest–responses I’ve gotten are from people who are answering for someone else. So, on a trip to Mexico City last year with my cousins, we took it upon ourselves to create starter packs for one another. For my cousin Eliza, it was protein powder and the ocean. For Sara, it was primary colors and wine. For me, it was a video camera and my plywood wall.
A little bit of background…I have always loved to decorate and redecorate the rooms where I’ve lived. Growing up, I think I repainted my bedroom walls at least four different times. When I moved into my New York City apartment, the same one I had just moved out of, I knew I had my work cut out to make it mine.
It was the first place I ever lived by myself, so getting the chance to add my personality to it felt like a kid being let loose into a candy shop. The possibilities were endless. After about a year of moving in–getting a couch, rug, dresser, mattress, desk–I started on my next project of moving things around. I changed the art on my walls. I replaced my “coffee table” (an old trunk I stole from my parent’s attic) with one that had a glass top. One night, I even had my boyfriend push my bed against the opposite wall. I had him change it back the next morning. Safe to say, it still felt like something was missing.
Around the same time, I grabbed drinks with my dear friend Caroline, who had just moved into a studio in Gramercy. We discussed room dividers vs. “open floorplan” studio apartments (LOL), overhead lighting vs. ambient light, TVs vs. projectors…you get the gist.
I shared my frustration with a specific flaw in my apartment—the naked wall you’d see right when you opened the door. At the time, it was plagued with a TV (eye-sore) and a set of framed prints (was going for Rochelle Canteen but got more student dorm).
She showed me pictures of her own white-wall fatigue solution: plywood paneling. It was beautiful, matched her mid-century decor, warmed the space without darkening it, and it was renter-friendly. I set a date for her contractor, Mauricio, to install the plywood, and we were ready to go.
The morning of our scheduled install date, Mauricio’s team showed up with the plywood. Due to the scale of New York, it looked minuscule leaning against the exterior wall of my building, so I imagined bringing them inside wouldn't be flagged by the security cameras. Welp, after holding the door open for the three men it took to balance the sheets, I was stopped by my doorman, and the men were told to leave (they were uninsured, and the installation wasn’t scheduled with my building, sigh). If I wanted to keep the plywood, I had no choice but to bring it through the service entrance and bring it upstairs myself.
Picture this: an already-embarrassed Margot carrying three 9’x 5’ wobbly, awkward panels through the maze of my building’s basement into the 9.5-foot elevator with a 6-foot opening, pulling them out of the elevator one by one into my floor’s hallway, and sprinting back into the elevator before the doors closed, leaving me to chase the plywood from floor to floor.
So don’t get me wrong, they were a hassle to install (although, for whatever reason, very easy to take down). But no matter how ridiculous it seemed at the time, they marked such a MOMENT for me.
It is so special to decorate a space with something that was so undeniably my own that it became somewhat of a character in that chapter of my life. There will be the Margot before the plywood wall, who was still trying to find her footing in the city and carve out a space of her own–personally, professionally. And there will be the Margot after the plywood walls, who knew when it was time to leave that apartment and New York City.
But the Margot with the plywood wall. So much growth happened for me in that era. That Margot was unrelenting, unabashed, and, well, I think she had a pretty good eye.
If Walls Could Talk is a newsletter about the spaces I find myself in. This post was inspired by a prompt from No Particular Order, Volume 1, “What makes a house a home?”
Currently preparing to move into my first big girl post-grad apartment and this got me hoping to find my own plywood wall - metaphorically but maybe literally too, who knows!
Suddenly I’m emotional about plywood