The remodeling progress for now
When the wife and I got married last summer, I moved into her house. Our plan at the time was to live there possibly up to a year while finding a house and then move. Since we were planning on moving fairly quickly, we didn’t really do any significant remodeling or moving of stuff. With the exception of adding what little of my stuff was worth keeping and a few pictures, the house decor stayed, more or less, with what she had setup. At the time, it was the smart move.
Flash forward eight or nine months, and with everything that we had going on and going on in the world at large, it was looking like we were probably going to be staying here another year. And even if we don’t end up staying, we decided that it was time we did a joint remodeling of sorts to make it truly our home. Add to this fact that we got some amazingly good deals on some very nice furniture and before we knew it, we had replaced half of our furniture. If the wife had had her way, it all would have been done at once several months ago. If I had been doing it on my own, it probably would have been over a year in the making. In the end, we had the money and compromised by getting things slowly over several months.
The first step was the dining room. We got it as floor clearance models, which means that a couple small nicks knocked off 50% of the cost. The set includes a table, four regular chairs, two arm chairs and a hutch. We got our first chance to add a leaf into the table last week, and that thing is long. Closed up it is around 5 feet long; and it accepts up to two 20 inch leaves for close to 9 feet of table. I have already been promised that at some point we are going to have dinner for two at either end of the mansion sized table wearing formal attiar just for the sake of doing it.
The hutch has actually been repurposed as our entertainment center in the living room. I have to say, I love our living room furniture. It is exactly the kind of clean, sleak, huge, modern furniture I have been looking for over the last few years. I don’t have a whole lot to say here except about the decorations.
We spent a couple of months looking for a good art piece to be the center of the living room with almost zero luck. In the end, we took our pillows to Home Depot and got some sample buckets of paint to match, and I went to town one off-friday. The result is what you see there, which I think is awesome even if I do say so myself. The window treatment were all my wife’s vision. The brown curtains were actually stuff I bought several years ago for my last bachelor apartment. The red drape was the result of my wife’s first adventure with a sewing machine. I like that whole thing too.
The bedroom was the biggest job to get ready. We both loved the furniture as soon as we saw it. I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to fit, but it does wonderfully. Still nothing quite prepared me for how much bigger they looked at home than in the giant showroom.
I was able to hold out on this purchase for awhile, mostly because I feel better about making big purchases when I do. Because of this, and the stores proximity to our church, we ended up making several visits to Ethan Allen so Amy could visit it. Once we decided to do the room, we ended up painting it, one color on the wall behind the bed and a slightly lighter color else where. The painting above the bed is an old favorite of Amy’s.
At this point, we are done for a good long while, with the possible expection of a nice, big TV, eventually, whenever I cave to her suggestions.
Nice painting.