Heart 2 Hands

Well, since my long, long post about the latest wedding gown is taking longer to finish than the gown itself, I will content myself with another, more recent creative project for my first post on this journal. It is on this week's to-do list to finally launch this little place, so this is it! 

So, about our Great Livingroom Makeover.....

Before we got married, my husband lived on his own in all the glory of bachelorhood.... and his decor definitely reflected it. :-) We didn't have money to buy new furniture for our little apartment when he moved into it 3 months before our wedding, so we began collecting whatever we could, and God graciously supplied all our needs. A bookcase from Jonathan's mom, and a baker's rack we used as an entertainment center, an old kitchen table we cut down to be a computer desk, my great-grandmother's antique settee, and our pastor's family's destined-for-the-trash green gingham couch and loveseat (with 3 legs between both pieces, soup cans made up the rest. :-) ) furnished our livingroom. My first challenge as a soon-to-be wife was HOW to make this into something homey and pretty. We settled on a more-or-less Italian country theme with a green, red, and yellow color scheme. A friend gave us an old trunk that had belonged to his grandmother, to which we added legs and called it our coffee table, and we bought a pretty dark red patterned rug with a shower gift card that made the room complete for the winter, though we put it away for a lighter feel in the summer. As I sat in that room as a new bride, I was able to survey it quite contentedly. 


This contentment lasted for two years and through a move across the apartment complex into a larger one. During that time we replaced the loveseat with a rocking chair from Salvation Army and a glider rocker from freecycle.com, since we were going to have a new baby, but nothing else changed. Early this year I realized I was ready to do something different. My dreaming didn't extend too far, just touching things up here and there, maybe making some new throw pillows for the couch, etc. I wanted to change the color scheme to possibly a lavendar and green, since that would allow us to have a change but still use the furniture we already owned. I talked to my husband and he said I could do it. We set a $100 budget and started brainstorming. 

While walking through Joann's trying to pick out material for the pillows and window swags (our windows had never yet had any sort of treatment, just the white blinds the apartment came with, and I'd recently come across some semi-sheer almond-colored material at Walmart for $1/ yd. that I planned to use for the curtains) and finding nothing that matched the picture in my head, I happened to walk past a material that was nothing like what I was looking for, but so beautiful. A silk dupioni in the most lovely shade of blueish green that to me was the very color of peace and serenity. It would never be made to work with those couches, though, so I walked on past..... then came back for a little sample to carry home with me, walking out with no other material. How to make this work?

By this time those poor couches were truly deteriorating, the seat sagging when sat upon, new tears turning up constantly, and the trash they'd once been delivered from was now beckoning. I would have been happy to just recover them, but they weren't structurally worth the money and effort, so we decided to check craigslist for something "new". I hoped very much to find something in a neutral color that I could work with more easily than that green gingham, and something good quality but as inexpensive as possible. I finally found just the thing, but when I emailed the owner it turned out someone was coming to get it that weekend. I was sorely disappointed, but imagine my joy a week later when she wrote again to say that the people never showed up and I was welcome to the couch if I still wanted it! Oh, and they had the matching loveseat, too, and were asking $125 for the pair! We asked if they would take $100, and they readily accepted. The details on this furniture are as follows- 3 years old, La-Z-Boy brand, lovely neutral beige color, great structural condition, but both pieces had some upholstery damage. I knew I could work with it somehow, and we picked the pieces up that weekend. I was thrilled! A few weeks later we found a WONDERFUL cherry computer armoire for $60, also on craigslist, and as Jonathan wanted it at least as much as I did, we got it too. :-) With a 40% off Joann's coupon we purchased 3 yards of that wonderful fabric, and elsewhere we found two darling lamps and a rug.

With a wedding gown in the making at the time, my decorating was brought to a halt for awhile, but early this month we finished it all. Here is what happened after our original $100 budget stretched to $250, with the originally unplanned but very happy purchase of 3 pieces of furniture, and after my husband turned out to have some very good and specific ideas about how he wanted it to look, and the willingness to pay for it :-) :