Slat Wall Part 5: The Accessories

With the slat wall and bench completed, we knew we wanted to upgrade the nearby furniture as well. This loveseat, a Craigslist find that was already very well loved when we bought it in 2009, was the first candidate for removal. The problem at the time had been that very few sofas/loveseats were under 5' (most being significantly more) and we could not find a single new product that matched our measurements for a reasonable price. This little guy was a mere 55":

Fortunately, 16 years later, there were more choices and we found ourselves seriously considering four or five options from three different stores. We knew we wanted the sofa to be blue, to continue our red/blue color motif for the room and that meant a LOT of swatches:We also knew we wanted velvet or microfiber, having read that cats don't usually like to scratch at them since the weave is so tight/nonexistence that they can't get purchase (which is probably also the reason none of our cats ever used our leather sofa as a scratching post). They definitely LOVED scratching at our cheapo gray love seat and also occasionally scratch at the chaise lounge in our sunroom sometimes.

The loveseats we considered (and went so far as to test out in stores, as much as we could based on floor model availability):

• The Caitlin by Interior Define, but it started at 63"--a tad big for the space. And it was a bit pricy considering it was still a made-in-China kind of piece,
• The Oslo by Interior Define, at 62" and a little less sleek and swoopy,
• Nomad, by Burrow, which sadly only had one acceptable color,
• The Andes by West Elm, with a split seat, metal legs, a little cheaper looking,
• The Andes by West Elm, but with a bench seat,
• The Eddy by West Elm, on a fancy (but also a little funny-looking) base, and
• The Jasper by Room and Board, priced high but made in the US and known for good quality.

It was nice to have options. Maybe too many options...We ended up with a LOT of swatches:

At the same time, we had to clear the side wall to put together a new storage unit. Our brown IKEA Expedit had been a good fit for the space, but all of our wall trim is white and all of the wood in the room was a medium reddish brown, rather than dark chocolate brown. We had help from the cats.

We swapped it for an IKEA Kallax (which is basically a redesigned Expedit--the cubes are the same but there is less trim along the outside). It's a bright "glossy" white rather than the standard white, to make it stand out even more. The new model even has an optional base to get the piece off the floor (easier to clean under it. We also briefly stored our Roomba under it, which was nice way to hide it away.

Again, we had some cat "help" during assembly:

We moved over all of the baskets and doors from our Expedit (there's a picture here to remind you what it looked like.) Because this was against a wall and not being used as a room divider, we also felt we could fill more of the cubbies, rather than leave it more open and airy. So we grabbed a few *more* baskets from around the house to see how it looked, and we also bought a few more buildable doors and drawers from IKEA (plus these cool little globe lamps, Fado)

We realized that while we loved the added storage, we didn't like the mismatched look as much as we had thought. Usually we like to strive for "thoughtfully eclectic" or something, but the various baskets all just looked messy. We turned to Amazon to buy a set of matching ones, while keeping the mismatched drawers and doors and we liked this look much better:

(In keeping with the random pet cameos, I figured the dog could have a turn as well). The most popular new addition was the mirrored door (in this picture, you can see the slat wall behind the camera). Unfortunately the cats really like the wide woven fabric on the bottom baskets, but at least they were not expensive if we have to replace them.

Returning to the sofa, after weighing all the pros and cons over MANY weeks of discussions, we decided on the West Elm Andes with the bench seat. The quality wasn't as high as Room and Board and the look wasn't quite as cute as Interior Define, but knowing that we have pets, we decided maybe we shouldn't buy a top-of-the-line "forever" love seat. The real risk was that for whatever reason, the swatch for the color we thought we preferred did not arrive with the rest of the West Elm swatch, and ended up arriving well AFTER we picked the sofa. I'm sure it took quite a journey through the postal system.

The top swatch is Petrol in performance velvet. The bottom swatch is Ink Blue in performance distressed velvet. We decided we liked the darker blue but not in the distressed look. So we held our breaths and ordered the loveseat in Ink Blue performance velvet (what you see behind the swatches):

And we love it. Thank goodness. The blue is the right color for the room (it goes amazinglu well with a throw we got on a trip). The cats like to scamper on it but not claw it. That does leave some claw marks in the velvet as they take off, claws extended, but those seem to wipe out. Clearly they have accepted it as a place to lounge, as have the kids (it's their favorite spot to lay down on weekend mornings to watch TV and we usually hear them argue over whose turn it is to sit there).

And with that, the slat wall and entry space redesign is over.

An Office Once More

When last we left off on the office, it didn't look much like an office, there being no more desk. So my preschooler could be forgiven for calling it "her office" when giving newcomers tours of our house. This is the picture we posted here last February.

Since then, we cleared out and got rid of the tall cabinet that you see on the right, and the vintage desk chair (that one was a little painful to part with). We bought a storage bench from Ikea, another Stuva, like the system up in the kids' room - it has the Folja drawer since that was all that was in stock at the time (and anyway, the colorful handles are cute). Apparently I never got a picture like that before we moved on to step 3.

Step 3 entailed the big ticket item that lets us reclaim this room as a proper office - a new desk. D, who actually does work from home sometimes and has been just sitting on the sofa with his laptop, thought it was finally time to get a proper place to do work. After some research on the Wirecutter, our constant source for shopping recommendations, we bought the Jarvis sit/stand bamboo desk from Fully.

That prompted us to do a little more rearranging of the cabinets and....voila!

A real office again! Just ignore all the toys...

Breezeway 13: waiting and decorating

We hit a bit of a lull on the final "punch list" completion and so the new room has been lingering in a state of almost-doneness. So we have started to plan our decor. One setback - we got picky over some of the bubbles and imperfections on the floor during the polyurethane application, so they are coming back tomorrow to sand lightly and re-coat. This means another week before we can put down any furniture at all and 30 days until we can put down the rug, which just arrived after being backordered for a few weeks and taking up space in another room while the floors are in a suspended state of perpetual curing.

But at least I can tell you our plan.

Step one - cover the windows. After ordering several samples from blinds.com for roller shades (they make so many colors!) and looking at the choices in a variety of lights and at night, we settled on a lightly patterned one that did a decent job of filtering the light and put in an order. We're not planning to put up curtains or cover the french doors at all, so the room is going to be bright, making light filtering shades a better choice than any kind of room darkeners.

Next to the sofa. After having an empty room for about a week and having the toddler enjoy the empty space, we debated whether or not the one we'd chosen (but not yet purchased) would take up too much floor space. We laid out and agreed that it would take up a significant chunk but that there would still be enough room for play.

So once we figure out how to get it home (seriously, this thing is currently only in the store wrapped together as 3 boxes on a palate totaling 250 lbs), we plan to add a Frighten to our collection of funny-sounding Ikea products.

After avoiding it for years, we finally are going to buy upholstered Ikea stuff. It's cheap (and with destructive young children that seems like a good idea) and has room to spread out and has a cool pull-out sleeper. We don't intend to use this as a guest room (see note above on how bright it will be) but having the flexibility of pulling out the sofa to sprawl out on was irresistible. Plus honestly I have always wanted a chaise lounge. No idea why. 

Onwards to the rug - as you might have guessed from the paint color and the gray sofa,  we are sticking to the same color scheme as the living room - gray, teal, and red - to help us blend the two spaces. We fell in love with this rug from CB2 (it's slightly more on the green end of teal than the living room, but we think it will work) and simply couldn't decide for a while if we wanted the 5x8 or the 8x10. Now that the drywall and trim is up, we measured it out and decided on the smaller size (why get expensive beautiful wood floors only to cover them with a rug that would pretty much go wall to wall).

(Our room will not look nearly as nice as either Ikea's or CB2's photos, but whatever.)

We have an ambitious plan for possibly assembling built-in style cabinets underneath the windows and shelving beside them, sort of like we have in the living room surrounding the television, but in white. There are some complications there, notably that Ikea kitchen cabinets are no longer made in the same thin depth that they used to, so they will not fit behind the door to the garage. So we are exploring custom cabinets or doing some Ikea hacks to shrink them. More on that later though. First - get the floor finished and put in the basics.

More blue chairs, more blue shopping

We've sort of dropped the chair thing as our house budget has had other plans (new AC...), but recently we stumbled into an unexpected choice: Room & Board. For anyone familiar with this store, you'll know that they make really fabulous wood furniture in the USA, but their price reflects their quality. We often oogle the furniture but alas, it is not meant to be for our price level.

So imagine my surprise when we wandering into a store to discover that the chairs there are in the same price range as the ones at Crate and Barrel and only slightly more than West Elm. And they come in dozens of colors!

We sat on one or two that we liked and then created a list from their online selection that would definitely prompt a revisit to test in person. Quinn, Braden, Abbott, and Cole all had the clean lines and not overly-stuffed look we are going for.

I was delighted to see that swatches were free and you could order up to some huge number like 20, so I picked all my favorite blues and waited.

They arrived and I was so excited to check which one matched best...

Only to discover that, yet again, my taste is apparently unique. They aren't bad, they are just blah. (I forgot to photograph them on the same pillow I did last time, but the blues are kinda the same.)

Oh well, I'll keep looking until we find the perfect match. West Elm just got some new colors in, plus I'm sure we'll find some other good candidates at other stores where we never expected to find them.

Chair shopping makes me blue

This corner looks sad and empty. And definitely not baby proof (easy access to a very breakable lamp). We've had a plan for it for quite a while now - a comfy chair, with a standing lamp behind it.

However, it turns out that's much easier said than done.

Usually I like a furniture challenge. The thrill of the hunt. But apparently that doesn't really apply to upholstered things. That's because 1) Used upholstered furniture can be risky, so that means no Craigslist or thrift stores and 2) Ikea doesn't make particularly comfy upholstered furniture, so my go-to store is not a good choice.

The quality of upholstered furniture also seems to actually be reflected in the price. Hardwood frames, durable fabrics, and sturdy springs and foam cost money. And even "cheap" chairs start at $200. So I started out with my usual non-Ikea standbys, Crate and Barrel (and CB2), West Elm, and Pottery Barn. West Elm had the best choices for our style and price range (they were in the $600-900 range instead of CB's and Pottery Barn's $1100-$1400).

We were particularly partial to Sloan

and Victor:

We went to a store to try them out. Because, you know, we are going to pay a lot and spend some quality time sitting in them. So we want to make sure they're comfortable.

One problem: not in stores. Or at least not in our nearest store (which isn't even all that near). And no one could tell us if they were in ANY stores. The customer service rep I talked to said there is no central tracking of merchandise. Spending that kind of money for something we can't try first seems...reckless.

But we kept considering it, since no other store had a design we liked (at any price tag, even). So I ordered some free swatches. We already knew that since our other seating is brown and gray, that we wanted something bolder, in the bright turquoise blue that is our living room accent color.

Here's what we got, set against a pillow we were hoping to closely match:

It doesn't come across as much as I like but trust me when I say all the colors are blah. The linen weave set of three is our favorite texture. But the rightmost of the 3 is too green and the leftmost is too gray/boring. The closest match is the middle on the bottom row, but that is a strange microfiber suede that neither of us like.

So we are faced with deciding whether to order a chair we can't test in a color we don't love - and since the colors are custom orders, there are no returns. And thus the chair hunt continues.

Funny enough, when I went to West Elm today to add the links to this post, I noticed they are advertising "new colors" - and sure enough, there are a few more blues. Swatches are on the way!

Some decorating challenges

We wanted to put some pretty new curtains in the office since the blinds (that were there when we bought the house) didn't fit with our new windows. We thought it would be easy. We wanted cafe curtains - the kind that go only about halfway up. So we needed the curtains and the rod. Well first after looking at lace in all price ranges, we decided to splurge for ones that seemed well-made and actual lace (and not plastic) so we bought these macrame ones from Country Curtains. We bought one panels per window because it said in the description that they panel should be spread wide. Well two problems with that. First, no way - it looked empty and we knew right away we needed two panels per window.

Second, the two 36'' curtains was actually about 35'' and 37''. So we couldn't pair them without it looking weird. Fortunately Country Curtains has good customer service and also fortunately, we planned to visit family that happened to live near a brick and mortar store, so they were able to set aside a few for us and let me open and compare them. They said the handmade nature of the lace makes that a fairly common problem and noted that perhaps they should at least start selling them in pairs.

Problem two - the rod. We wanted something a little more interesting than the usual cafe curtain rods with a boring metal finial at the end. We found them, of all places, online at Walmart. The screws included with the installation kit, however, were unnecessarily long (left). The ones we already had at home were jarringly shiny (right). So it was off to the hardware store to find something in the middle.

I'm glad we found a metal screw that matched better (the one on the left). The right one, in zinc, really stood out when the bracket was on the wall.

Installation almost complete:

After what seemed like a lot of hassle just to hang curtains, we're really pleased with our results:

They provide exactly the kind of coverage we want in the office - it gives us privacy without blocking any light. And we can see them from the hallway so they are a nice sight when headed to the basement or bathroom.

A few more challenges we're facing now in the decorating department. As we continue to baby proof, we realized this corner is an accident waiting to happen - flimsy furniture, glass lamp and vase, access to curtains and wires.

Add to that the fact that we still don't quite had enough seating in the living room for when we have a bunch of guests, and D decided that a large chair and floor lamp might be the solution. If the chair is big enough, it will mostly block access to the corner completely.

Do you know what this means? I get to shop for furniture again! We're not sure exactly what kind of chair we want. We both love chaise lounges but I can't think of a way something like that would fit. We'd like a bolder color since our other seating in the living room is brown and gray. So given the room colors that leaves teal or rust red (or something that would compliment those). Maybe another wing chair? I think a higher back would look better there to help it show up from in the corner. Send me suggestions!

And finally, another challenge that maybe I can stop from becoming a bigger problem. The teal rug that moved from our main seating area to our entry way is showing signs of wear in the corner. This was the beginning of the end for our red rug, because it was so hard to avoid when vacuuming and the suction pulled at the loose ends and tore everything up. Is there something I can do now to prevent the undone section from getting worse? I'm a knitter so I'm not afraid to get creative with yarn.

Lots of calls for help and suggestions in this post, so leave a comment if you had ideas!

The Same But Different

I took advantage of the long Labor Day weekend to get to a multi-day project. Our red coffee table clashed with our new red rug and it was hard to find an opportunity to have a few days in a row where we wouldn't miss it in the living room (relatively...).

So out onto the lawn on a tarp, propped up on containers so that I could get to the legs. A quick sand with a medium-fine grit, just to take the shine off.

Then after a quick wipe, it was time for paint! Safety Blue in Rustoleum's High Performance Professional Enamel. I didn't actually buy it for this project - we had some left over from painting the build-in shelves in the nursery.

One coat,

Two coats, three coats:

I followed drying instructions for minimal drying time (you have to spray within an hour or so or wait 48 hours, and no way were we going to make it that long without our table). The top surface was uneven, but no where near as bad as it was when I painted it red. I attribute this to a few things. 1) I was painting over paint and not over whatever was on it the first time. 2) This blue enamel went on much easier, so maybe there is something to this whole "professional" grade stuff. And 3) I cared a whole lot less and didn't dwell on imperfections.

I waited two days and then applied Slate Gray Minwax stain purchased a long time ago for my blue cedar chest. I tried a different technique (also associated with not caring) - I wiped it on and then off the top surface and then dripped it into the crevices of the side edges and legs.

Finally after more waiting, I sprayed the whole things with three thin coats of Minwax Polycrylic spray (one coat, then super-fine sand, then promptly decided that wasn't worth the effort and did coats two and three without sanding). Two more days to cure fully and back it went!

But we weren't idle in the living room while we waited. We took advantage of not having furniture on the rug (or at least not having *much* furniture on the rug) to finally get a rug pad down. First we let it air out in a different room - it stank of chemicals coming out of the packaging. But a day or two later, it was fine and ready to get put under the rug (we had more motivation now that the little one is experimenting with crawling and rolling and banging her head inelegantly against the floor on the way down...)

And so without further ado, here's the new and improved coffee table!

See how the gray is in the details? D actually thought I had painstakingly painted each line, but since stain is so liquidy, I just dripped it in and wiped off the rest.

Honestly I like this even better than the red - better spray paint and better stain technique. Let's hope that's the last time I had to paint this thing, though, because twice is definitely enough.

All filled up

Now that the nursery is done, we have no more extra rooms in the house to store furniture. And with all of our other rooms pretty much completely decorated and filled, we truly have no more flexible space - with the possible exception of the crowded but very sparsely decorated basement.

What this means is that if it doesn't fit, it needs to go. Which is rather traumatic since I seem to have inherited my mother's love of collecting solidly-built furniture in need of some TLC. But without a place to keep it, I'm going to have to learn to control myself. It's heartbreaking, really.

Case in point - when we redid our entryway with a new, expanded Expedit and a little white bench, we ran out of room for the beautiful chevron patterned cedar chest that we kept there. After trying to find it a new home in various places in our house, we knew it had to go.

Fortunately, after a few annoying weeks of tripping over it in the dining room, where we'd temporarily crammed it, we found it a home with a family that seemed to like it as much as we did.

Next example - this piece took a lot of elbow grease to refinish but had been living in the extra room (i.e. current nursery) without a real home for over a year. Despite all our work on it, I feared it might have to go as well. Happily, we realized it could live in our hallway without significantly blocking our path:

Maybe it's not what I would have chosen to put there, but it works and meant we didn't need to get rid of it.

Even something as minor as our cheap Ikea Poang chair, which we've had for years (through 3 different addresses!) seemed like it would have to go. Right now, it's living outside in our breezeway, even though it's definitely not made outdoor furniture. It's currently in furniture-limbo and we might have to get rid of it eventually. But it can live out the winter there with the rest of our lawn furniture, which we finally brought in before it got too cold out.

It's been hard saying goodbye to old friends and it is just as hard to force myself into being disciplined enough not to buy more furniture unless I know for sure it can replace something we already have.

This won't be a problem soon. Once baby arrives I'm sure I'll have more important things on my mind than furniture. But walking around a flea market on Saturday admiring all the lovely things sure was a challenge.