Oh boy, am I ever excited to share this with you guys today. This is an update that Corey and I have been talking about and planning for several months now, and we just hadn’t gotten around to pulling the trigger on it until recently.

You see, there’s this ottoman in our living room…

It has served us well over the last year and a half-ish, and it was one of our earliest furniture makeovers. We were so proud of it when we first completed it, but now that it’s been living in our house for a good while, we were slowly becoming more and more disenchanted with it. The padded part ended up much thinner than we would have liked, and quite frankly I was getting sick of staring at all of that orange every day. It was a great idea in theory, but I don’t think I’m one that can handle large pops of color in a piece of furniture that is such a staple in the room. Over time, it started to become just too much for me.

We originally had the idea to find a camel-colored leather ottoman with a ton of tufting. Basically, like a Winchester sofa in ottoman form.

 (Via Craft Home Decor)

Mmmm. Only problem? That basically doesn’t exist. Or at least, not exactly what we wanted, and typically not for less than $1,000. That’s the problem with being both incredibly picky and incredibly cheap.

So, we finally gave up and started searching for other options. We knew we wanted tufting, and we knew we wanted something big and cushy. Beyond that, we weren’t very specific. We looked at about a million and two options before finally falling in love with this guy from Amazon:

Tufted, cushy, sexy legs – it’s got the whole package! Now the only problem was choosing a color. There are almost a dozen different color options for this ottoman, so we definitely weren’t going to be limited. Our first instinct was (of course) gray, but after some thought we realized that it would just be too much gray in our room – we have a gray couch and gray walls, so we definitely need some contrast in the ottoman. After a lot (a LOT) of debate, we settled on two different color options. teal and beige. We loved them both, and we couldn’t really figure out which one would look better. So, we turned to our trusty photo-editing software to see what they would look like in the room. It’s a (very) rough idea, but it was better than nothing.

We loved the teal and thought it would look fantastic in the room, but, of course, we also loved the beige. We were thisclose to ordering the teal…and then we thought about the orange ottoman we currently have. We loved the color when we first brought it in, but as the room has evolved we decided it wasn’t really working anymore. We were tired of it. With a color like the teal, it would be easy to fall into that same trap down the road – it’s much easier to get sick of a color like teal than a neutral like the beige. We also had to consider the possibility of changing up the room at some point in the future. The beige will go with anything – even if we completely change everything in the room, it’ll blend right in. The teal? Not so much. We decided that we’d rather have neutrals in the main, big pieces in our room and stick to bringing in colors through the accessories that can be changed a little more easily.

So, we decided to order the beige. It’s not quite as much fun as the teal would have been, but we’re confident that we’ll love it for years to come, and it’ll go with the room no matter how we decide to change it in the future. Amazon told us it wouldn’t be here until the end of November at the earliest, but we were in for a happy surprise when it showed up at our house one day last week.

And once we set it up? It was love at first sight for me – it feels so much more polished and it layers right into the room beautifully. Corey likes it too, but is insistent that we find some ways to bring more color in now that the ottoman is gone. I agree – we could definitely use some bolder (and bigger!) pillows to add some more fun, but I think it’s definitely getting there.

It’s going to take us some time to layer in some more accessories to make the room feel more complete, but I think this new ottoman is definitely a step in the right direction. I love it!

Anyone else get a surprise delivery last week? How about changing up major pieces in your house – are you doing it too?

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that Corey and I got a copy of Ana White’s new book and that we had half a million things that we wanted to make out of it (that may be a slight exaggeration, but you get my point). Well, we recently decided to stop dreaming and start doing and that it was high time we pick up some wood and get to building.

What did we decide to start with?

This beautiful (gorgeous, amazing) console:

You see, we’ve been looking for a console for our front entry way for what feels like forever. We found one that ended up being way too large, and haven’t been successful in finding anything else because we’re too picky and too cheap. We still want something antique for the entry way in the long run, but we finally have come to terms with the fact that it just might not be in the cards for us right now. The type of console we really want typically runs around $400 on Craigslist, and usually the only one we can find are painted or refinished in a “shabby chic” style, and that’s so far from what we want. We have a very specific idea in mind (and don’t really want to spend $400 on it), so it’s just going to have to wait for a while.

HOWEVER, we really want a console for that area right now. The too-small table that currently sits there is driving us crazy, and we don’t want to feel rushed to find something and end up settling on one that we don’t love. So when we saw this guy in Ana White’s book, we knew it was a perfect solution. All of the wood ran us less than $100, and it’s a super-versatile piece, so when we do eventually find a beautiful antique console to go in the entry way it will be a no-brainer to find somewhere else in the house for this one.

We bought the wood for this project a couple of weekends ago, and then when we went outside to get to work on it, we realized we had a problem…

I hesitated to even show you these photos because, um, EMBARRASSING, but I like to keep it real around here. Somehow or another we had let the whole workshop fall into complete and utter chaos, and there was no way we were getting any work done in here until we cleaned up. So we spend a couple hours one Saturday evening cleaning, and we got it to a much-cleaner-but-still-not-perfect state.

At least it’s clean enough to actually work in now! So, now that we had a clean workshop, it was time to deal with all of this wood that was staring at us:

So, we got to cutting! Corey did the vast majority of the cuts, but he did let me do one of them just so I could try it out…

Can you see the terror on my face? I’m not so sure about this whole power tool thing.

Corey, on the other hand, looked like a pro doing his cuts.

Annnd that’s about as far as we’ve made it so far. Womp, womp.

Corey has actually drilled all of the pocket holes and we’re at a point where we are ready for construction, we just haven’t gotten around to it yet. So, while this may go down in history as the most uneventful blog post of all time, I promise it will have awesome results in the end. Sometimes things just don’t end up happening on the timeline that I’d like for them to!

Anyone else in the middle of some exciting projects? How about trying out your hand at building something for the first time?

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Alternate titles for this post:

• Furniture Jenga
• Why Won’t All My Furniture Fit in My Room?
• We Were Super Excited About This Chair, Then We Realized It DOESN’T FIT
• How To Squeeze More Furniture Than Necessary Into Your Bedroom

Can you sense the frustration?

Let me back up and explain.

A few weeks ago, when I took you on a quick tour of my mother-in-law’s house, I mentioned that there was a pretty, light blue chair in her master bedroom that she had promised to us in the near future. Corey & I have been in love with that chair for quite a while now, and we’ve been itching to get our hands on it ever since she mentioned that she had plans to get rid of it.

So, you can imagine our excitement last week when she left a message on Corey’s phone letting him know that she dropped it off in our garage while we were at work. We couldn’t wait to get it in our room – and we already had the perfect set-up for where it would go all planned out in our heads.

As soon as we had a few spare minutes to do some furniture rearranging, we carried the chair upstairs and excitedly got to work. The plan was to take this dresser that sits in a corner of the room:

(Apparently I don’t have a better photo of this dresser from before – oops!)

And move it to underneath the television (which is currently what could easily compete for the most-embarrassingly-ugly-spot-in-our house).

Then, we’d plop the chair in the corner, maybe add a cute table, and call it a day.

We pulled the dresser out of the way and put the chair in place – looked good! We agreed that it needed a table, so we started playing around with some options. First, we tried the most obvious solution – the white sewing table that had been under the television.

(Note: Please excuse the quality of the photos in this post. They were all taken on Sunday afternoon, and I forgot how the time change would affect my lighting conditions! Also, you’ll see in the rest of the photos that the room is very messy…I was about to wash the sheets, so, um, yeah. Our room isn’t always clean – welcome to reality!)

Yeah, it didn’t work. The table was way too tall, way too large, and just didn’t look quite right. So, not an option.

Next up we tried one of our bedside tables. We’ve been contemplating replacing them (we still love the look, but they’re a bit small for us), and they’re a perfect size for this little nook, so we figured it could be perfect.

Only, as soon as I got it in place I felt like I had been transported into my grandmother’s house. Having two pieces right next to each other with such vintage-y lines (the chair and the nightstand) just wasn’t working for us, so that option was out too.

Next up? The turquoise table that used to live next to our couch.

It worked (as long as we painted it a different color, of course), but I still wanted something a little more modern. It was definitely the best of our options so far, and I began to think of some fun options for painting it (white with gold dipped legs?), so I thought it might be the right solution.

Just for good measure, I decided to see what our little laundry basket would look like over there – it would bring in some wood tones and some new textures – and I wanted to make sure I looked at all of my options before making a decision!

I liked the wood tone and texture, but it definitely wasn’t the right combo.

So, with the chair corner somewhat figured out, I moved my attention to the dresser.

And that’s where the problems began.

I put the dresser where we had planned on putting it (under the television) and while it looked fine from the front…

We had a problem from the side.

This is the view that you would see immediately upon walking into our master bedroom. Definitely not welcoming. We could possibly get past the dresser-in-your-face when walking in the room, but in addition to that we had the major problem of how far it stuck out from the wall because of the outlet right behind it that has a power strip plugged into it. It’s hard to tell in the photo, but it’s away from the wall by a good two or three inches, which looked seriously awkward in person.

Not. Gonna. Work.

I was determined to have the chair in that corner, though, so I needed to come up with a better place for the dresser. I sat in the room and stared at it for what felt like forever, and I just couldn’t come up with a good solution. I tried it by our bed…

…and it actually didn’t look awful, but it was a bit awkward to have a nightstand on one side and a tall dresser on the other, and it wasn’t very functional (I actually use my nightstand, so getting rid of it wouldn’t be great).

There really wasn’t any other good place to put it (I wanted to put it in the trash can at this point, but since it’s full of my clothes that wasn’t really a viable option), so I tried putting it back in the corner with the chair.

It actually looked pretty cute from the front…

But when you went back to the entering-the-room viewpoint, it just looked strange and awkward.

At this point, I was completely out of ideas, so I just gave up.

No, I didn’t throw the chair back in the garage and pretend it doesn’t exist (although, I seriously contemplated that option). I decided that maybe this particular corner of the room wouldn’t work for the chair, and I decided to try it somewhere else.

The only other viable option in our room currently for the chair was the corner next to my side of the bed. It’s a bit cramped, and it’s next to my bedside table so there’s a tiny bit of the grandma vibe, but the super modern bed and accessories cancel it out enough to make me happy.

And, of course, the dresser is just going to stay in its little corner where it doesn’t have to worry about playing nice with the rest of the room. But, I figured since I was already moving it around I would shift it so that it sat flush against the wall rather than being set at a diagonal. It had been bothering me ever since we brought the full-length mirror up to the bedroom, and I thought I’d like it much better if it wasn’t sitting at an angle. And I was right.

Oh, and while I was at it, I decided I should probably go ahead and make the bed so you can see some true “after” photos.

No, it’s not a perfect solution. Yes, it’s a little cramped. Will it stay like this forever? Absolutely not. Corey and I have plans to eventually replace both of the dressers in our room with very different pieces, so in the long run the chair probably will end up in that corner. It’s just not ready to go there yet. And, honestly, I love the chair enough that for now it can hang out in a slightly-wrong-for-it space while we wait until we can fit it into that right space. That’s the nature of fixing up your house, no? Sometimes things are messy, and awkward, and not perfect, but we’re always working towards making it just a little better!

Do you have any rooms in your house with too much furniture in them? Anyone else have an insane urge to throw some furniture out the window this weekend?

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When we were at our family reunion this weekend, I spent quite a bit of time lusting after all of the antiques my great-uncle has just hanging around his barn (and a few other buildings around his house). He is a bit of a hoarder collector, and he has mountains of furniture and random odds and ends floating around all over the place.

One night when we were sitting down for dinner, I caught a glimpse of some chairs around the table and just about had a heart attack right then and there. They were gorgeous, rustic, amazing…and I needed them.

I immediately fell in love with the worn look of the wood and the gorgeous gold tips on the legs. The fabric was definitely leaving something to be desired, but other than that they were perfect.

I briefly considered just tossing them in our car and making a run for it, but Corey and I would like to be invited back next year, so I figured that probably wasn’t the wisest move. Instead, we decided to just straight up ask him if he’d let us buy them off of him. He has dozens of chairs in the barn already, and this set even happened to still have price stickers on them from when he originally bought them.

So, for ten bucks each, we came home from the family reunion with a new set of chairs for the breakfast nook in our kitchen!

I adore how the curve in the chair backs kind of mimics the curves in the table, and I love how the wood tones warm up that area of the room. It’s also a happy coincidence that they’re a mid-century style, so they fit perfectly with the table. I’m just pretty much all-around thrilled.

We definitely need to get some new fabric on them, but we aren’t quite sure what we want yet, so it may be a while. We know for sure that we won’t be doing anything to the chairs themselves – we love the wood look and now that we’ve seen how something other than white looks in there, there’s no way we’re getting rid of it!

Have you ever gone shopping at a relative’s house? Anyone else pick up some fun new furniture this weekend?

 

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Ever since the day that we moved into our house, a little over a year (!!) ago, and we plopped our giant Ikea mirror into a corner in the living room, I’ve stared at that little corner on a near daily basis and cursed it for looking so awkward, empty, and just generally ugly.

We weren’t really sure how to handle the awkward space behind our couch, but we knew that throwing a mirror against the wall and calling it a day definitely wasn’t part of the plan. After a year of living here, the only thing we knew for sure this corner was good for was our Christmas tree.

Well, we finally recently hit our boiling point with this corner of the room, and we just couldn’t take how empty and strange it was looking anymore, and since it’s not socially acceptable to leave your Christmas tree out all year long (boo!) – we had to do something about it. Luckily, we had just the thing in mind, as we had been admiring/drooling over Ikea’s new line of Vittsjö bookcases for a while – they’re simple, cheap (only $70!), and just so happen to be exactly the right size for our corner.

(Via Ikea)

And, of course, after I showed Corey the gold ones that were featured on Little Green Notebook a few months ago, he decided that we had to do the same thing for our awkward little corner.

(Via Little Green Notebook)

So, off to Ikea we went! I’ll admit, I didn’t take any photos of the process here – I just followed the directions to put to bookcase together, sprayed it with a few quick coats of spray paint (Rustoleum metallic brass for the win!) and brought it back into the room once it had dried! We originally had grand plans to replace the glass shelving with stained wood or something along those lines, but once we got the shelf into the room we realized that we absolutely loved how the glass brought in a new material to the room and helped the bookcase feel nice and light – it fills the space perfectly!

I definitely still have some work to do in the styling department, but it wasn’t until we actually got this guy in place that we realized we really don’t have a ton of extra trinkets or tchotchkes laying around the house to decorate with – I guess that’s going to have to change soon! For now, I just tossed a few random things on the shelves for the purpose of showing you how it looks in the room, but I’m sure the look of the bookcase will constantly be evolving as we add to it and switch it up.

Since I’m sure no one is actually paying attention to the book titles in the bookcase, allow me to point out to you that in the process of setting this guy up I discovered that I have not one, not two, but FOUR copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. How does that even happen? I guess this proves that it’s definitely my favorite book ever!

Oh, and for those of you who happened to notice that my beloved white elephant is missing from this photo…about that…

Sigh. There may or may not have been tears over this incident. Corey has this poor little guy out in the workshop and we’re going to see what we can do to fix him up – we’re tossing around the idea of filling the bottom with a little bit of sand before we glue the trunk back on so that we can hopefully prevent another unfortunate fall. Poor elephant.

But, back on a happier track, I’m so happy to finally have something a bit more substantial and useful in this corner – it no longer feels like a waste of space to me! And, if you’re wondering where the mirror went, it has found a new home in our bedroom for now – but it’ll probably migrate to about seven different places before it finds a permanent landing spot!

Do you have any weird spaces in your house that you don’t know how to fill up? What do you love to fill your bookcases with? I obviously am in need of some ideas for mine!

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