This crazy weekend

Don’t get excited by the title, it wasn’t crazy in a Girls Gone Wild kind of way, but as-in an insanely busy weekend! I started the weekend off by posting a bunch of furniture and home goods on Craigslist. I’ve been tripping over all the stuff that was in the old house that doesn’t fit in the new house. The husband was getting irritated that everything was all over, and to be honest, it was getting on my nerves too. So onto Craigslist it went. Framed art, vases, mirrors, lamps, curtains, etc. When I got everything together in the front room to take pictures, it almost filled up the room!!

One of the first things I posted was our old living room set. For lack of a better picture, this is the old set, minus the chair.

This picture was taken one of the first days we were in the house, before I had a chance to paint and take down the old lady  window treatments. I kept saying that I wanted to lighten up the furniture in the house, both in color and  in size. Everything we owned was heavy, dark and formal. It was clashing with my Mindful Gray color on the walls. And I wasn’t re-painting. Again. Right away we had a bunch of responses, most creepy and some spam-ish. But we got a call from someone coming from over an hour away that ended up picking the whole set up on Saturday!! Yay!

After they left, seeing the living room empty was kind of a shock.  Uhm… where was that little voice inside my head that should have been screaming, HELLO ELIESA!!! It’s almost Thanksgiving and we are having 17 people over for dinner! I guess I didn’t honestly think it would sell so quickly! Oh well, too late to reconsider. Bye-bye dark living room, hello something different!!

Now, how was I going to fill it back up? My self imposed rule for re-furnishing the living room was to not spend more than I just got for the existing set ($750). So, I scoured Craigslist. I found a couch about an hour away and we picked it up tonight, after we stopped by Ikea to pick up a few more things. Hey, when you are in the immediate area of Ikea, one must stop, right? Back to the couch… well, I love it!

It’s a light gray, more modern than I would normally choose, but I like that it doesn’t have loose cushions, it was clean, it was long and it wasn’t too “heavy” for the room. I paid $350 for it, but I had looked it up online and I know that they are selling for about $1500, so I feel pretty good about it. Unfortunately, on the way home, it poured and everything got wet where the tarp didn’t cover all the way. Ugh. No worries though, we toweled it off and pulled out the blow dryer and all is fine!

This morning, I was checking Craigslist again and found some chairs at a yard sale that looked promising. Two of them were tailored pieces with older tropical fabric, but that can be fixed. I loved the shape of them. I hopped in the car and headed over. When I got there, they were in great condition. They looked like they had been sitting in a formal room at your Grannie’s house, where no one is allowed to sit on them! YAY!  The ad said they were $30, and I thought that was for each. There were three, but I didn’t need the one that swiveled. Turns out that he wanted $10 a chair!!  I have to admit, that they are kind of not beautiful right now, and I won’t be able to get them re-covered before Thanksgiving, but they will look fabulous once we get them re-upholstered in something gray and black and graphic (maybe?). For $20, even if they didn’t turn out to work well in the space, I could put them back on Craigslist, right?

Moving on… Remember these?

Well, I cleaned them up and painted them, and now they look fabulous next to the new couch! The marble table tops are the perfect gray for the space, and the new color breaks up all the gray going on in the room.

Hmmm…Technically, I paid for them last week, before I decided to just re-do the living room, so the $99 doesn’t really need to come out of the budget, right?? Come on…I still need money for the rug, and new curtains, and lamp shades! Oh, and accessories! I am going to re-do the lamps I found at Faith Farm, but none of them have shades. They don’t match each other either… is that a no-no? What if I find matching shades?

I also re-finished these babies. I am using one in our bedroom and I’ll put the other between the two chairs I bought today. They look lovely. Can’t wait to show you!

Edgar built the Ikea shelves we bought for our closets, so everything was pulled out of the closets and I’m still in the process of putting things the way I want them. Because I’m insane, I re-painted (as in, I already painted when we moved in here, but decided to do it AGAIN!) my closet last night a gorgeous shade of blue/green called Newburg Green (a Benjamin Moore color). I like the color a lot, but I thought it would be bluer, so I was surprised to see how Philadelphia Eagles green it looked. No matter, it’s fabulous against the white shelves. Now, I have to paint the Thomasville faux bamboo chest of drawers, and I’ll be all set. I can’t believe that I haven’t had a functioning closet since July. It will be nice to hang my clothes somewhere, instead of on the back of chairs in the bedroom.

I did a bunch of other stuff too to get ready for the holiday, but I’m so tired right now that I can’t think any more… which makes typing pretty hard. 🙂 Will reveal the room once it’s all put back together, but right now, it’s still a jumble of stuff all over the place.

Thanks for stopping by 🙂