I move in tomorrow, with very little stuff, but more is on the way, and I want to be ready for it. The rooms, front to back, are porch, living room, dining room, bath, bedroom/kitchen. I’d appreciate comments on these decisions to make now:

•how to use the living room and dining room? The layout of the front room seems easy peasy for the study, and putting my study/office/library up front so I can step between my desk and the hanging chair (on the porch) without breaking my train of thought makes sense, BUT so does having guests come straight into my living room, with the study further back. When my son visits, he will stay in the living room. If that is the front room, I can use the back door while he visits so I don’t go through “his” room except to get to the porch.

•Use the one big closet, which is off the middle room, for clothes, or put a wardrobe in the bedroom and use the closet for “stuff”? There is a storage space in the basement. My plan before seeing the closet included getting a wardrobe (actually, I’d use simple wooden shelves with funky (brocade?) panel curtains). I might put everything in there for now, then set up the shelves/hanging rod/curtains when the rest arrives.

•paint the walls of the study/office/library dark green, or wallpaper them, perhaps with the temp paper in the middle of this photo, or simulate a chair rail, with the bottom half the walls green and the top half papered? The walls in the front and middle rooms are fairly broken up by doors & windows, so I might only need 2 rolls of paper if I do the latter. Furnishings for this room will be IKEA Ivar shelves—pine wood stained teak color—full of books, an armchair upholstered with kente cloth very similar to https://pin.it/6KmGjCr , and eventually a large secondhand desk. Overall, it will be a fairly serious “masculine” look (I have massive problems with the values assigned to gender codings, but think they communicate what I mean clearly)

•How to keep the living room from looking like a nursery? I like my silly curtains ( https://pin.it/7GIRz3x ) and they were indeed designed for kids’ rooms, but I also want grown men to be comfortable in that room. The plan so far is those curtains, then make ribbon curtains for the other window using the colors from the curtain tabs in pastel and more saturated versions, an accent wall with a huge paisley wall sticker (essentially wall paper) in more saturated shades of the colors from the tabs, a grey couch (the curtains have grey stars on them) with cozy throw blankets and pillows, and a secretary made from an old radio cabinet, where I’ll store bills and similar paperwork. The ceiling fan I’ll hang there is white with some fanciness on it, and I want lamps with crystals that throw rainbows onto the wall and floors. Is that too sweet to bear?

•Store my bike in the basement, accessible from the front of the house, or in the entryway in the back? This has implications for traffic flow.

For now, I will put simple cafe curtains on the doors to the porch. When my shipment from Germany arrives, if I’m using the front room as a living room/guest room, I’ll move those curtains to the French doors between living room and dining room, and hang my silly tab curtains above the porch doors. If the middle room is the one I’m using for the living room, I’ll leave the simple cafe curtains on the porch doors and hang my curtains between living room and dining room. Also for now, it looks like I’m sleeping on a mattress on the floor until I find a bed online.
Reading up on the history of paisley, I learned that it was popular in the 1920s with wealthy young women who considered themselves boho, hanging out in their own scandalous apartments, doing cocaine, Absinth & the such. In the growing pains of its early stages, that might be what the apt will look like—yikes!