Poor Bernadette Lawler. Just three months before I started torturing her, I'm sure working with me seemed a perfectly good idea. Or at least Kara Green, who does her public relations, thought so.

In October Green emailed me about Lawler, who's an interior designer, personal shopper and founder of Mixed Company, a quirky home furnishings store and art gallery in Old City. Having read my column, Green suggested I get what she called an "apartment lift" to counter the winter blues.

Lawler, she suggested, could come to my place and add "light and liveliness so it emanates more positive energy--sort of like a regular dose of Zoloft for the home." Those PR folks certainly know how to push your buttons.

Unfortunately, Lawler didn't know what she was in for.

My surroundings are chaotic. Kitty litter in a disposable jumbo-sized baking pan (the nonstick surface is phenomenal). Cat hair on the kitchen counter (he likes to eat up there). A kitchen floor covered in old issues of the Inquirer (the dog is paper-trained). Dog hair embracing the sofa and the rug. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of books. Every single letter I've received since eighth grade. Boxes of art supplies. Every key to every house I've lived in since age 13.

You get the idea.

When Lawler and Green came to my apartment the first time, I could see the disappointment on their faces. Lawler, who is friendly and upbeat, walked around and took measurements, saying, "It's not so bad." She seemed to have ideas for how to make things better, which was reassuring, but at the same time she looked sad about the piles of papers and the unsightly metal basket of magazines I'd never read again.

But the worst thing was my attitude. Like a difficult child who disagrees with everything her parents say, I resisted every suggestion. Most of all, I refused to get rid of my sofa, which Green and Lawler were especially crushed about.

They didn't understand, though. The sofa isn't just any sofa. It's the Bloomie Sofa.

Bloomie is my grandmother's name. She's 92 now. For 34 years, she had the same sofa, and she brought it with her when she moved to Philadelphia from Miami. But soon she realized she was ready for a change, so with great reluctance, my mother asked if I'd like to have the sofa--all 7 feet of it--for my own. Much to her dismay, I grabbed it.

I couldn't imagine giving that sofa away. When I went to visit my grandmother twice a year in Miami, it was where we sat together and watched TV, where I flopped after a day of too much sun and chlorine, where her friends and sisters sat and gossiped and from whose fresh-smelling pillows I reached to the eternal glass bowl of candy on the coffee table.

When I think of that sofa, I think of my childhood, my aunts and uncles, whom I miss, and all the time my grandmother and I spent together. How my mother--and Bloomie herself--could consider letting the sofa go, I'll never know.

So I insisted on keeping it, lugging it from teeny apartment to teeny apartment, enraging different sets of movers who simply wanted to set the behemoth on fire.

In 34 years, my grandmother re-covered the sofa only once, and it was in pristine condition. But after a year with me it looked like, well, like it had spent a year with me--with a person whose only priority is her pets.

Who could blame Bernadette Lawler for trying to rid me of my sofa burden? But I was so obnoxious about the Bloomie Sofa, I think she despaired of ever making a change.

A few days after she'd left, someone pointed out that my childish defiance made things impossible for Lawler. How could she help me if I said no to every idea?

So when she called me a month later--against her better judgment, I'm sure--I tried to be more accommodating. I was still going to keep the sofa, I said, but otherwise she had carte blanche. And so the transformation began.

In just three days, Bernadette Lawler changed my life. First of all, she painted the living room walls, whose yellowish wood paneling I suspected was actually particle board. She gave them a soothing shade of beige and added darker beige vertical stripes, which made the room look bigger and more elegant. She hung a tan curtain against a wall to give the room some cohesion and sophistication, and she rid the surfaces of all the not-so-charming-after-all knickknacks.

I have a lovely table, but I'd never been able to eat at it because it served as my entertainment center. I have a real entertainment center, but I used it as a waystation for sticks of incense, lip balms, matches, bills, candles, notebooks, CDs and anything else I threw on there. She switched the two around so that the items were actually put to appropriate use.

She pulled the sofa away from the wall and brought in lamps for indirect lighting, which gives the room a cozier feel.

She masterminded a junk removal and painted an opposite living room wall a sort of soothing turquoise blue. She arranged the books sparsely on the shelves and according to color (red books, brown books, etc.), which makes things look clean and neat.

She cleaned and painted the kitchen, marshaled more junk removal and cleared surfaces that hadn't seen the light of day in at least a year.

By the time she was done, the apartment was actually attractive. I might even have people over now.

But the main thing Bernadette did was reinvent the room so that the sofa--the bane of a decorator's existence--was the focus of the room and, indeed, its triumph.

Because this issue is devoted to first-time home buying, I'd like to suggest you decorate correctly from the start. Indirect lighting, painting the walls, getting rid of 20-year-old posters you'll never hang again--this is the way to go. But if you have a Bloomie Sofa, work around it. Some things are worth holding onto.



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