August 26, 2008

Sofa…So Good

I bet you didn’t know how many sporting events you could actually play in your den when there’s no furniture in it: soccer, badminton, baseball, football, not to mention our fierce light saber duels and wrestling matches. We even have a ball pit. The kids love it. Andrew is crawling everywhere now.

For nearly three months, we’ve gone without a sofa. As mentioned before, we had to throw it out along with our comfy chair. Other than our bed and the carpet, there’s nothing remotely soft in our house to sit on. We decided not to rush out and buy a couch immediately. We never really were pleased with the look and feel of our den. The red paint felt dark and the furniture too heavy and outdated. We wanted to save up and redo the room to fit more of our style, but we needed help with that.

Enter Tiffany’s sister and fiance, Kayla and Wes. She’s a designer. He’s an architect. They also blog for an interior design blog called Apartment Therapy. Together they are one dynamic, passionate, decorating duo. I think they took as on as their project. They gave us some tips for finding a couch, sent us some links to look at, and we loaded up the kiddos and off we went to furniture store after furniture store.

First step. Find a sofa to decorate around. We did. We found a sofa we love. It wasn’t this, which is the style we went looking for:

But we came home having purchased this:

None of the ones we thought we would like were comfortable at all. So we chose this brown leather sofa. However, this choice didn’t quite meet their approval, and in her own words, it “threw them for a loop.”

If you want to see their suggestions on how we might should decorate around it, take a look at this blog entry she posted on the Apartment Therapy site called How To: Decorate Around a Dark Leather Sofa. It’s nice that there are so many positive comments from people who like the couch. I really like the orange chair she suggests we pair it with.

Dude I wish I was sitting on that couch right now, but it’s still on order. I (and my behind) are waiting ever so expectantly for that truck to come. We’ve been waiting a month already. Just two more weeks at the most.

We still have several more steps in this den redesign project that we’re going to tackle as we can, such as a new desk, fireplace, tv console, paint, chair, window cushion, accessory chairs, and wall art…whew. It seems like a lot more when you list it all out.

Until then, it’s game on inside vast wide-open spaces of our little Georgia home.