MY FRIEND MAXX the Furniture Mover

Yesterday my male malamute Maxx was bored. Bored Malamutes are notoriously troublesome. When I am bored, I sometimes rearrange the wall hangings. Maxx rearranges furniture. When he was a puppy, he merely ate it. He had a preference for upholstered antiques and window sills. His sister Maya preferred anything cherry by Kling & Co.

 I can usually detect when Maxx  is inspired to redecorate the living space, because instead of just collapsing on the laminate, he walks around in circles, lays down for a couple of minutes and then circumnavigates the room. Fortunately his creative energies generally  focus on one room at a time, and because he is a Malamute and bred to lounge around campfires with Inuit partners, he prefer the company of humans. His first choice of target spaces is the bedroom..

The room we call a bedroom was not originally a bedroom.  I have no idea how the previous owners of the house envisioned it when they added it onto the original house. Since they ripped out the wall that separates it from what I think was designed to be a master bedroom and also removed a weight bearing wall in the great room, I am afraid to hazard  a guess. I do know that our master bath was originally an aviary. Our bedroom is about the size of a small apartment, and was 21 x 24 before we added a walk-n closet.  It opens with French doors off what I suspect was originally a living room, since it has a raised hearth (see photo). We now use it as a multipurpose space since Maxx and Maya ate the furniture. But, back to the bedroom. It is still very large, but the wall spaces are not amenable to variety in arrangement of the bed. But Maxx is a malamute, doesn't read Architectural Digest  and doesn't care.

Yesterday his project was to move the bed into a position so he could walk around it, which required him to move it out from the wall.  It also required him to move my bedside table, an essential piece of furniture which I use as a desk. Because Chris is pretty much bed bound these days, Maxx was required to move the bed with 180 lbs of extra weight, but then, Maxx weighs 140 and has a pull weight of about a ton.
Also, we have an electric split king bed which we use without a frame for ease in changing sheets,  a God send when sharing a bed with someone of contrary sleeping habits.  However, the halves cannot be moved independently because we have them bound together to avoid falling through the crack in the center. This was not a problem for Maxx, who disconnected every wire to the bed, my kindle, my laptop, all lights and the telephone without knocking anything over except my cell phone. My bedside table ended up in the open space before the electric fireplace, a cherry antique dentist's file cabinet ended up in the space to the adjoining room (another outsized bedroom) and when he was finished, Maxx took a nap behind the bed. However, after a few minutes, he decided he did not like it there and opted to sleep outside. By then temperatures in the desert had fallen to 77 and there was a breeze.  I was stuck inside trying to find a way to get in an out of bed.

Somewhere in the course of all of this, I had deigned to scold him, albeit very gently.  I merely said, 'No, Maxx' as he was tangled in our last remaining connection to the outside world--my land line cord.  He gets very indignant when I scold him.  He left the room, went a slammed his stainless steel water dish into the wall, came back to the bedroom, inched by the table in the middle of the walking space, faced away from me and pouted.  Not even pets and praise got me back into his good graces.  Not even cheese. So I did the only reasonable thing left. I moved the bed out from the wall another eight inches and changed the position of my bedside table. Now he can walk around the bed whenever he wishes,although the bed is pretty much in the middle of the room. Today the room arrangement looks like hell and Maxx has lost all interest.in the space behind the bed.  He is sleeping by the door to the bathroom, which requires me to either walk over his massive frame or go to the bathroom in the other wing of the house.

All that furniture moving has him all tired out. Me, too.