Home and Life as of Late

Beyond work, the house seems to be the primary thing on my mind as of late. My mother and granny are coming to visit in August (exciting!), which has also influenced me to have the house situated before they get here.  Luckily, our financial plan was based upon getting the new bed and sectional during these summer months.  As I've mentioned before, we've had much difficulty with delivery to our current location.  Our primary couch we ordered last summer from West Elm took an unexpected extra 3-4 weeks due to our location, and while we enjoy their style we've opted to no longer do business with them due to their unwillingness to alter delivery options. Macy's will not deliver to this side of Louisiana, but allows for scheduled furniture pickup from the Houston warehouse. Penney's guaranteed delivery within 4 weeks to any continental US location, but 2 months after ordering our sectional our delivery date had yet to be determined. We have a very modern taste that is difficult to find in most stores, but we've definitely been wishing for the ability to find a store that would allow for furniture to be purchased and picked up in the same day. 

Hence one of the reasons we decided to purchase a king bed from.....Ikea. Definitely not the most environmentally friendly option, but since Ikea is 3 hours away we were able to purchase and set up our new modern style, king bed in the same day.  Add on to that the fact that we purchased a new bed set w/ two night stands, mattress, and almost all organic bedding (I've been purchasing sales for months) for about $1000, and I'm definitely happy we decided to go this route. I have no doubt that the particle board, veneers, and new mattress are off-gassing all sorts of chemicals, but in this case the cheaper, easier method won out.  Ikea did offer a natural/somewhat organic mattress but in the end we went with the regular one.  I will tell you that the enlarged sleeping space has been amazing, although the dogs aren't too happy about being relegated back to the floor! We won't always have walk-in closets so down the road I'd like to get the matching chest of drawers also.

Also at Ikea we purchased this great picture of a lime tree that is hanging in our kitchen.  I know that reproduced big box artwork isn't exactly the greatest, but it goes with our kitchen and we both love it.

Last weekend I painted my childhood chest of drawers, shelf, and night stand in the same brown spray paint I used on the end table.  It's amazing what a new coat of paint and some new hardware can do! All of these will be used in the guest room. Our neighbors have been wanting to increase a mattress size also and will swap out our queen size mattress set for one of their full size sets.  As long as this queen set is comfortable for them then they won't have to purchase a new one, and we'll make the swap official. We also will return their extra futon that we've been using as an extra bed in our spare room.

This is the current living room lay-out after rearranging due to the TV.  If you haven't noticed, we keep ourselves occupied by rearranging furniture! ;) In this room we swapped the lay-out so the table is at the back end of the room and the sitting area is near the front.  The furniture placement will change slightly next weekend when the hub picks up the Macys sectional from the Houston warehouse. At that point our futon will move into the extra kitchen area, and people will have a more comfortable place in there to sit. In the above photo, you can see the lil' quilt that my gal's sister made-to-order for me!  Eventually we do want to find a second hand buffet/bar and a better desk option, but for the most part our furniture buying is now complete! 

Feels like a lot of purchases, but I know they're budgeted for, well researched, and are items that will serve us for years to come. We still have some special touches with art work, etc, but altogether I'm so glad with our lil' home.

We didn't take any pictures of our recent trip to Houston as I forgot the camera, but one of the things we made sure to do on this trip was to drive through part of downtown.  It reminded me a lot of Portland to be honest and was very pretty.  There are a lot of things that the hub and I would love to check out in Houston, but honestly after this next trip for the sectional I'm not sure we really want to head back due to the insane traffic we always face while there.  Traffic jams galore and crazy drivers definitely decrease our desire to explore and check out the wonderful museums and the like that are there. Houston would be a great place to check out if you direct flight into it and easily transport downtown, but I have yet to meet a single person who enjoys driving in it.