Updating The Living Room With A New Rug

There is something about being nearly a year into living here that makes it feel like we have accomplished a fair amount of “evolution” over the last 357 days (not that I am counting…). I guess it is because living somewhere for a month is not truly a lot of time for tweak-age, but twelve of those in a row – well, it is sufficient time to get things going. Like living with a floor plan for 11 months (simply to be suuuuure) and then knocking out a wall that we have hoped gone from day one:

It is also sufficient time to make a few furniture and accessory changes as we transition from working with what we have (like random stuff carried over from our first house) and first-instinct choices to a few more thought-out decisions. Yup, these things apparently take time – at least in our experience (remember this post on that subject?). So here is the story about a fairly sizeable three-fer tweak of epic rug, ottoman, and chair proportions.

We have not made any major furniture/accessory purchases since the simply-moved-in phase when we got our sectional, our first rug, our bed, and our big dining room table. Then we went on a building/Hands-on kick for the next nearly-year (making our $104 console table and our $124 wall-to-wall double desk and saving nearly 4K by laying our own stone patio and getting a ton of estimates to save 3K on our kitchen wall-opening). We have mostly simply been picking up especially inexpensive secondhand furnishings since moving in (like our $35 desk chairs, $25 dining chairs, and four secondhand kitchen cabinets for our in-progress remodel for under $100).

So after many months of building up the savings account and waiting for things that we enjoyed to come along, it felt pleasant to in fact buy them. And since we had some “store credit” towards Joss & Main from curating a sale with them as a side gig (more on that here), we enjoyed that we could put that towards our living room tweaks, especially because it is one of our most used rooms, so we will certainly notice and appreciate it. But now onto what we tweaked and why…

For the last nearly-year we have enjoyed our fluffy green shag rug (it was strong for a wiggly crawling baby and a wobbly toddler – and was so thick and inviting that many an adult found themselves sitting/lying on the floor). But there are a few issues that have popped up as Clara has grown.

# 1. Let us simply say that finding milk dripped and goldfish or cheerios crushed into our plush rug was less than pleasing. Yes, we are one of those casual families who does not have a no-food-in-the-living-room rule (I mean, peanut butter & jelly or a bagel with cream cheese is not living-room approved, but dry crackers and a sippy cup of milk are). That is simply how we both grew up and we truly appreciate the this-house-is-not-a-museum vibe, so we plan to keep it that way. And although vacuuming or a bit of scrubbing (for spilled milk) got ‘er done (and Burger was excellent about hunting down the occasional goldfish before we even knew it’d gone missing) the rug was still a bit higher maintenance than a lower pile one would be now that we have an energetic toddler.

#2. The size. In our first house both our living room and den rugs were simply 5 x 8′ since the rooms there were so small. So although we knew that our new living room was much larger, somehow an 8 x 11’ rug sounded like it had to be big sufficient for our 25 foot long room. Well… try as we might to “adjust” to it, it consistently felt a little small (we are certainly still learning how to decorate a larger space). Like our giant sectional was simply baaaarely contained on the boundaries of the rug:

So when I saw this giant (10 x 14!) 100% wool rug for $599 (down from $798) on Joss & Main I got excited. And nervous. That is not exactly peanuts around here. But it is a large rug – and rugs that size that we like are typically 1-2K (which made me fake ugly-cry on at least three occasions). It nearly felt impossible to find something extra large, low pile, and our style that did not end in three zeros. So $599 began to sound fairly good. At least good sufficient to contemplate for a little while.

After mulling it over for a few hours, I chose to show John to see what he thought (we have a full agreement agreement, so we do not buy anything that we do not both enjoy). That way if he nixed it I could simply close the window and stop thinking about it. But when I went to show it to John, he had it up on his screen (he also gets Joss & Main alerts and had clicked on that rug and left it open on his computer to “talk to me about it” a little later). Crazy, huh? We were both secretly mulling over the same rug. It was meant to be. So we gritted our teeth and put in our order. I am not going to say that we did not have sweaty palms, but we went for it.

Since we’d been temporarily using a too-small placeholder-ottoman that did not have storage which used to reside in our first bedroom as a side table, we also found ourselves pining after this big tufted leather storage ottoman. Again, it is not exactly a low-cost addition to the room. At all. But nearly fourteen cubic feet of additional hidden storage was a large draw (it is nearly 3 x 3 x 1.5 with an straightforward-open hinged top). Of course we also appreciated that it is a correctly-sized counterpart to our giant sectional (as opposed to looking like a too-small donut hole) and that it is not hard and pointy for little toddler heads (but can be used for serving food & drinks with the addition of a pleasant big tray). Yup, she’s versatile. And we never could have sprung for it at 900 beans, but at over $500 off… well…

And then somehow this $169 chair (down from$339) said “how you doin’?”…

…which was especially convenient since the parson’s chair that we purchased for $70 from Target about four years ago was looking a little rough due to tons of use which led to one side of the faux-leather cracking so it looked like this:

So we waited patiently at the door for everything to arrive, pausing only to eat, sleep, change the baby, work on the kitchen, and journal. When everything arrived fairly much at the same time, it was sorta like Christmas. Literally, it kind of was (we declared these items to be our Christmas gifts to each other for last year, this year, and next year). Psst- pardon the rug wiggles, we still need to get a rug pad. And as for the art swap, I meant to journal about that a while back. It is in fact extra burlap-ish fabric that I used instead of the colorful paper. I enjoy that it has more texture and does not compete with the bright pillows and accessories.

Spending that kind of money on a rug and ottoman was certainly not a drop in the bucket for low-cost-os like us. Heck even $169 for a chair is not typically our MO (we are no strangers to spending $20-35 on thrift store or craigslist chairs). But it did feel pleasant to add up the sale savings ($199 + $521 + $170 = a whopping $890!). And more importantly, since we have worked our buns off to Hands-on so many projects over the last 11 months it meant that we were able to save a fairly pleasant chunk of change, so our bank account was thankfully simply fine with the living room spree (we do not like to buy anything we cannot immediately pay off – more on that here).

Of course we are hoping to reuse the old round ottoman and the old living room rug in other still-evolving spaces (you know we are use-what-you-got fans) and we might even try slipcovering the faux-leather chair in some lively fabric for another spot as well. So we will have to keep you posted on those cha-cha-cha-changes too. Of course we still have about a million other working-with-what-we-have items going on, like the wrong sized rug in the office, a too-small TV and media cabinet in the living room (we hope to build a pleasant media center to balance out our chunky distressed console table) along with many fully-missing elements (like a large buffet/console table with art and a rug in the entryway off of the dining area and an whole playroom and sunroom that have yet to be tackled along with all of our bathrooms). But we will get there someday.

Knowing that our first house took us 4.5 years to complete is a strong comfort to us, because it takes away the we-want-it-all-done-now pressure. These things take time. But we are feeling truly good with our one-year-in progress (see a lot of that here). How about you? Do you have a “magic number” of months or years after living somewhere when you at last start to feel more settled and “evolved” (after feeling around in the dark for a few months while you get your bearings)?

Psst- To anyone looking to purchase the rug, ottoman, or chair – Joss and Main has flash sales (only lasting a few days) so of course by the time we got this stuff in the mail and took pics they were not for sale anymore. But plenty of their stuff can be found on wayfair.com (though it is not typically as heavily discounted over there) or you can get on Joss & Main’s mailing list here (that is an instant invite, so you do not have to wait). Hope it helps!