New House, New Couch

THIS little update has been a long time coming. 🙂 We bought a new couch. And we love it.

Lately, I’ve felt a little stressed about the posting schedule… there has been so much happening to the house, especially recently, that I just cannot keep up! As you know, three weeks ago we had a big party to celebrate Baby Thomas at our house. It was so much fun, but really gave us a run for our money in terms of getting things in order both in and around the house. Talk about a DEADLINE. Our house has changed more within the last month than it did all of the other five months we’ve lived here.

So yeah, there is a TON to bring you up to speed on and rather than stress out about the timing and order that things happened, I’m just going to start throwing random updates at you. Completely willy nilly. Today is the couch, next could be the front porch, next week maybe I’ll finally finish those hall bathroom posts… we’ll hit it all eventually. 🙂 For those of you Type A people that need a better road map, my sincerest apologies.

Anyway, back to the couch! The living room in this house is a really great space because it is open to the kitchen and even to the hall and part of the sitting room around the corner. Here’s what it looked like before we moved in…

And looking from the other direction, you can see how it opens to the kitchen (which is behind the camera, to the left)…

For the first few months that we lived here, we just plopped the furniture from our old house down and called it a room. It worked, but it wasn’t the perfect fit and we knew that someday down the line, we’d be in the market for something else.

Back in July, my mom and I made a stop in the Habitat Restore (because I can’t seem to get through a post without raving about this place), shopping for nothing in particular. That’s when you know you’re in trouble. When there’s no goal in mind. 🙂 I should preface all of this by saying that Mitch and I had talked about someday investing in a new couch- a sectional, to be exact- now that we had a new and larger space to fill. I wanted something in the gray family and something large and wrap around so a lot of people could fit on it. But this was all way down the line because we knew we’d be sinking a good chunk of money into a piece like that. Here’s an example of one I found with a quick Google search… these things can easily run $1,000 and up depending on the size.

We also talked about going the Ikea route to cut costs a little bit, but even Ikea pieces are no drop in the bucket when you’re talking big sectionals…

So we put the conversation on the back burner and chalked it up to something we’d slowly save up for and then purchase when we’d had more time to live into the space. But you obviously know that didn’t happen, as I mentioned earlier that Mom and I were walking around the Restore with no agenda (aka. sitting ducks). During our perusing, I spotted this…

I say “spotted” like it was tucked away and I had to use a magnifying glass to find it… not so. This thing was so HUGE, it would actually have been more impressive if we had walked the whole store and not spotted it. We’re talking, like a double wrap around, SIX PIECE sectional. I mean, it was just showing off, really. 🙂

Since I knew we were not in the market to be buying a couch, I didn’t really give it much thought… just wandered over casually to see what the story was. Price tag check… $900. Um, what?! Under a thousand dollars for that whole thing?? I’ll admit, the wheels started turning. Slowly, because $900 is no small sum of money, but still… I mean, it’s a big couch.

I sat down on it and pulled out my phone to do a little Googling… it was an Ethan Allen sofa and the closest comparable thing I could find online was a 3-4 piece, selling for $6,000-7,000. This is when I started looking around to see if anyone was looking to stake their claim… which is when I saw the sign. The sign that said everything in the store was HALF OFF. So I called Mitch. Right there from the couch. I was too afraid to even get up and try and find my mom to come over and look at it. I’ve learned that if you think you want something in that store, don’t leave it unattended because nothing lasts very long before getting snatched up. After sending photos to Mitch, clearing the purchase with him, putting a claim ticket on it, dragging my mom over to see it, and doing a little negotiating, we ended up walking out the door having snagged it for $400 buckaroos. Never in my wildest dreams… just picture me happy dancing all over the parking lot as my dad and Mitch worked out the transportation logistics.

They had met us at the store and we borrowed a friend’s truck to load all of the pieces and transport it home.

The couch itself was in pretty good condition, but we vacuumed it down and took off all of the cushions.

The covers came off and got thrown on a gentle cycle in the wash and then hung out to dry on the clothesline before we assembled everything.

We only ended up using half of the pieces in the living room because the thing is just too darn large to fit them all. The rest are sitting in our basement and together, make up a whole extra couch on their own. 🙂

To celebrate, we bought some cheap and fun pillow covers from Hobby Lobby just to add some pizzazz. 🙂

These days, though, the whole space is looking a lot more put together with a more thought-out pillow scheme and a few other additions to the room to make it feel more like a cozy living space and less “most of our stuff is still in boxes, but we found this really awesome couch”.

The red and aqua pillows and the coral spotted ones came from Target and the other ones, we already had.

Add a few blankets and a fuzzy throw and we’re making headway!

I just love this cozy reading corner seat!

And as for those other additions, we hung the mirror from the last house back over the couch (although, now it looks a little dwarfed by the larger sofa!), added a big, leafy plant, and a standing lamp that we found in the basement.

Here’s a close up of that plant… I figure I better log him into blog land because who the heck knows how long we’ll manage to keep him alive?

Oh, and CURTAINS! That’ll be a whole other post, but we are now the proud owners of curtained windows. Consider this your sneak peek. 🙂

This room is far from finished, but it’s a good start! We’d still like to find a soft rug to ground everything, hang some art on the walls, and figure out what is going on with the wooden shelves behind the couch (which also came from the Restore). You know what, though? I think we’ll just enjoy the room as is and the rest will slowly fall into place as we continue to settle in. Anyone else ever go into a store and come out with WAY more than you expected to? Do tell… 🙂