Frivolous Things

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A Few Furniture Related Questions

We have come to the portion of Moving Into a New House where we are considering buying some new furniture. We have plenty of furniture, from the old house, but there are a few things that are missing from our collection. Plus, there are a few things that we’d prefer to replace because they just aren’t right for the current space.

The thing is, we have never really had to buy furniture before. We are deeply spoiled: most of the furniture in our house was handed down to us by my husband’s parents, who have moved several times over the years and who accompanied each move with gifts of furniture. Hand-me-downs from my in laws include two couches, two loveseats, an armchair, a kitchen table, The Piece, a desk, some filing cabinets, a baby grand piano, and lots of artwork. I know. We are very, very lucky.

This means that, aside from purchasing two bedroom sets and assorted furniture for our child, we have no experience buying furniture. But… buying furniture is kind of hard? And unpleasant? Like, how many couches do you have to sit on before you decide that THIS ONE is the right combination of firm and comfortable, that it is formal enough for the space, that it will fit in the room, that the quality is good, that the price is reasonable? And then you have to choose the fabric?! Yikes.

In an instance of great good fortune, my friend Jen (HI JEN) happened to send me a photo of her couch (it wasn’t really of her couch, it was of her beautiful and charming children), and I asked about it (because it looked comfy but also aesthetically pleasing) and she gave me the details. And THEN our local Macy’s had several of the very same couch IN STOCK. There was only one person working in the entire Macy’s so my husband and daughter and I were able to sit on all the different options and examine the different sectional combinations and look at all the fabric samples completely unbothered by salespeople or other customers. With Jen’s assurance that this couch is a good couch, and the evidence of our own sitting, we are now going to order this couch. SO. That’s one big thing to check off the list.

But we have other furniture needs and I don’t really know where to begin. You have Furniture Opinions, yes? Because I need your input please.

  • Where do you get lamps? We have looked at Target, and the lamps are… limited, and also a lot of them look kind of cheap. I am aware that Target does HAVE perfectly acceptable lamps; our old bedside table lamps were from Target, and they lasted a long time and I liked them just fine. We would not be looking for new beside table lamps had I not broken mine during the move. I have been suffering for my sins, lampless, since August. I looked at Crate and Barrel for lamps and it seems like you can’t get a lamp for less than $100, which is far more than I feel like I want to spend on a lamp. So maybe my question is not, “where do you get lamps?” but “where do you get nice, sturdy, aesthetically pleasing lamps that aren’t a million dollars?”
This lamp costs $350! $350!!!!!!
  • What is the deal with slipcovers? My husband and I had a hand-me-down loveseat in our bedroom for twelve years. Neither of us noticed until now that the loveseat is wearing a slipcover. The slipcover is not, as I would have assumed, covering anything; I would have thought you would have purchased a slipcover to conceal a fabric you no longer liked, for instance. But now that we KNOW, we feel like we might want to get a new slipcover. One that is more our style. That is as far as I’ve gone with this line of thinking because I don’t really know where to go next. And also, are we stuck with the skirt part?
Sheesh this is a terrible photo. And I couldn’t even straighten the cushions before taking the picture? YIKES. P.S. The side table is a hand-me-down and I hate it so much. I can’t even articulate why. I just HATE IT. But it has utility so I haven’t yet donated it. The lamp in this photo came from World Market, which no longer exists in our city.
  • Do you have a yoga mat you’d recommend? Does a yoga mat count as furniture? Let’s pretend it does for the sake of not wanting to revise the post title. One of my favorite parts of the new house is a dedicated room for exercise. But the flooring is Very Hard; my princessy bones have apparently grown accustomed to working out on a yoga mat on top of a plush carpet, and my tailbone and shoulder blades scream at me if I try to work out on a yoga mat on top of the floor. My solution was to get a nice thick yoga mat from Amazon. But, while the new mat is technically thicker than my old yoga mat, the material is much squishier, so it is not any more comfortable than what I already have. I tried to stack the yoga mats, one on top of each other, but they slide around. What I really want is a GIANT yoga mat that is also thick. Does such a thing exist? Rephrase: Does such a thing exist for under a million dollars?
Another terrible photo! And the floor is so dirty! Mainly because we had boxes filling this room until three days ago. But also because it is surprisingly difficult to clean this kind of flooring. Also, my husband and I discovered that the bottoms of his shoes, which are highlighter yellow, are shedding when he walks on the treadmill, leaving two yellowish tracks on the treadmill belt and a film of yellow dust on the floor. So weird.

Those are the most pressing furniture questions I have at the moment. Don’t even get me started on end tables. I think we’ll need at least one – maybe two – for the upstairs living room. We will also need couches and chairs and a rug for that space, but we’re living with our old hand-me-down couch and no rug for now. I don’t have the mental fortitude for ordering more than one couch at a time.

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Favorite Things Party

A few weeks ago, San linked to this article about how to host a Favorite Things party, and I have been thinking about it nonstop ever since. The gist is that you and a bunch of friends get together, and, after agreeing on a budget, each of you buy enough of one of your life essentials to give to each guest. (The article lists suggestions for how to do this with a big vs. small group. It also suggests going with a theme – kitchen, beauty, etc.)

Yes, I know it’s very off-brand of me to want to host A PARTY, because that’s just not my jam. But I have three or so friends that get along with one another who might also think it’s fun. I am so not ready to have real live people in my real live house, but I am maybe warming myself up to the idea. 

In the meantime, I keep thinking about what I might bring as my Favorite Thing. What would you bring?

This kitchen tool. I use this ALL the time. Mostly for breaking up ground beef, to be sure, but it also comes in handy for scrambling eggs or doing a chunky mash on things like potatoes or avocadoes. Sometimes if I have frozen vegetables I am using in a soup or something I will use this to break them up in the pot, too. It’s versatile and dishwasher safe and I use it all the time.

A cooling eye balm. This costs more than the suggested budget, but I love love love this eye balm. It has a cooling element that I find very refreshing, plus it adds a much-needed glow to the saggy smudged undereye area. 

Olive juice. Okay, okay, this is kind of a niche product, so maybe it wouldn’t go over that well at a Favorite Things party. But I love this stuff! It makes for really tasty dirty martinis, which is the only kind of martini for me. I also get a chuckle out of the name, despite the fact that I have never and will never go by Sue.

Cat slippers. My daughter got me a pair of these several years ago and I wore them to shreds. They just made me so happy, to look at their cute little cat faces. (They also come in llama or pig or sloth, if those are more your style!)

A stylish outdoor wine tumbler. I got this as part of a Fab Fit Fun box a few years ago and for some reason, I get such a kick out of it. It’s pretty and portable and makes me feel like A Fancy Lady.

Wearable reading light. This isn’t technically something I use – at least, not very often – but my husband uses it and it (usually) prevents me from waking up when he climbs into bed to read at one or two in the morning and therefore it is high on my list of favorites.

The best foot cream. I credit Nicole for the hot tip about this foot lotion. It is The Best. I put it on my cracked, dry feet before bed and they feel all soft and happy the next morning. MAGIC. You have to get the exfoliating kind, though – the regular kind is fine, but it doesn’t have magic properties.

Korean street food snack. My husband and I bought a package of garlic Tteokbokki when we made our date-night trip to the Asian grocery store. While the description isn’t wildly exciting, at least not to me (“rice cakes with red chili and garlic sauce”), the actual snack is SO tasty. Slightly sweet, slightly spicy, with a texture unlike anything I’ve ever had before. Kind of like if you were to cook penne pasta but not all the way through, so it’s somewhere between chewy and crunchy. I fear that this description might be a deterrent, which is the opposite of my intention. In any event, this stuff is SO GOOD. Oh, it is also extremely easy to make. 

Packable reusable bag. I have a million reusable grocery bags that I keep in my car, but I keep one of these in my purse, folded into its little square pouch. It comes in handy ALL the time, if I’ve popped into Trader Joe’s for “just one thing” without a grocery bag and end up buying too many items to carry, if I need an extra bag at the airport, if I’m out with my daughter and she finds eighty perfect rocks she cannot live without. Also, it’s machine washable which I love.

Matcha whisk. I love a nice soothing cup of matcha in the morning, and this whisk really does seem to eliminate lumps and clumps. It’s inexpensive enough that I could possibly even pair it with a little bag of matcha; Trader Joe’s has smallish bags that aren’t wildly pricey. 

Ice roller. My husband got me one of these last year and I use it for my feet. I LOVE IT. You can remove the little green portion and put it in the freezer, and then pop it into the handle, and voila! cooling and soothing foot rolling action. I think this tool is intended for faces, but I have also used it for bruises, like when I bark my knee against the corner of the bed, or for bug bites, to which Carla is extremely sensitive and which develop into enormous golf ball sized welts. There’s something about being able to roll the frozen part over the affected area that makes it more comfortable than dealing with an ice pack.

Okay, those are some of my favorites. Now I want to hear some of yours!

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here. 

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Crafting a Craft Room Part 2

One of Carla’s favorite pastimes is crafting. This is a blanket term that, for her, includes without being limited to:

  • Drawing
  • Painting
  • Making things with yarn
  • Using hot glue to make shapes/structures
  • Using a 3-D pen to make shapes/structures
  • Building things out of paper or foam
  • Cutting up paper into tiny confetti bits for unknown purposes
  • Diamond painting
  • Coloring
  • Gluing pieces of cardboard together
  • Transforming pens, paper towel rolls, dowels and other items with string, gems, glitter, foam, etc.
  • Making Barbie furniture
  • Making clothing for various stuffed animals
  • Cutting paper into snowflake shapes
  • Origami
  • Sculpting animals out of playdough or clay
  • Making things out of yarn
  • Sewing scraps of fabric together, to make clothing or purses or stuffed animals

She is extremely creative and derives a lot of joy from crafting. While I might prefer that she were to make things that had some utility, I certainly don’t want to restrict her creative mind. The big problem is that her creations tend to take up a huge amount of space. 

So our solution was to create a craft space just for her in the basement. (Slide the image below to see the before and after.)

Based on wonderful suggestions from you, my husband and I went to Home Depot and found a door to use as a craft table. Home Depot has a surprising (to me) variety of doors, and we went with one that was flat, unstained, unfinished, and unadorned in any way. It didn’t even have a hole for a doorknob. Just a flat slab of wood. Best of all, it was fairly inexpensive – around $85. (We are comparing the cost of the door to the cost of an actual table.)

We allowed Carla to choose a paint color for the door, and then the three of us painted it. 

We already owned a six-cube organizer shelving unit, so we bought a second one. Then we bought fabric bins to put inside some of the cubes. Once the paint was dry, we set the door horizontally across the shelving units.

My favorite thing is this spinning desktop organizer, which holds a bunch of pens and scissors and paperclips.

The “table” is nice and tall, and big enough to hold A LOT of crafts. We set up Carla’s Cricut machine on one side, put the spinning desktop organizer on the other side, and filled the shelving unit bins with construction paper and foam and painting supplies.

Over time, we have added additional shelving units and fabric bins, and lots of plastic bins and smaller shelving units.

It is a very well-used space. 

Two things that I think we still need, but haven’t yet figured out:

  1. Some sort of plastic floor mat. I would love to protect the carpet. But we have only hit roadblocks when trying to find solutions. We originally thought we could get one of those stiff plastic mats that you can put under a desk so that your chair wheels don’t get stuck in the carpet. But to find one that is large enough is prohibitively expensive. We considered finding some heavy plastic sheeting, like the kind you put down when you paint… but I’m not sure that would be sturdy enough for daily use, or how we would affix it well enough to the carpet. We then looked into buying a cheap rug that we could put under the desk… but my main concern about that is that it might create a tripping hazard in the basement. Plus, the cheapest rugs at Home Depot have raw edges, and I think they would fray and fall apart pretty quickly… but I have no idea how to resolve that. So for now, we deal with occasional paint and perpetual glitter on the carpet.
  • A chair. I think Carla would benefit from having a drafting stool of some sort. She says it’s tiring for her to have to stand when she’s drawing, and I get that. Sometimes, this means that she moves the crafting onto the floor, which I do not like. Maybe a stool of some sort would make using the actual table all the time more appealing. I don’t think she would use a stool all the time… but that’s fine. Then again, the need isn’t so pressing that I’ve done more than idle googling. 

The space is usable and Carla loves it and uses it regularly. Overall, it is a success.

My primary complaint about this space is that it is a craftastrophe 95% of the time. It is a horrific mess that encompasses the top of the table and the space underneath and bleeds into the surrounding areas. (Toggle for the mess if you dare.)

The problem is that no matter how many organizational bins and shelves and baskets you buy, they only work if you use them. And my kid doesn’t use them. I have no idea how to help her with this. One of our family mantras is that everything should have a space, and when you are done with something, it needs to return to its space. But that… doesn’t happen. 

Either Carla is in the middle of a project and doesn’t want to put it away…

Or she forgets to put it away…

Or she doesn’t know where the item’s “home” is (or, worse, it doesn’t really HAVE a “home”)…

Or she has used the storage bin for some alternate purpose… (This one really annoys me. For instance, we have this little case that has a bunch of separate spaces for small items, like pom poms or gems or paper clips or whatever, and she had removed everything that should be in it and replaced those things with individual small chunks of clay that had since dried out. This kind of “using a storage unit as a toy” is frequent and drives me NUTS.)

I am not sure how to reframe things for Carla so that she understands the how and the why of putting things away… or so that she sees the bins and shelves as Storage Only and not props in her elaborate imaginary scenarios.

If we ever buy another house, my dream is that we dedicate an entire room to Carla’s crafting. A room with our makeshift table, and tons of built-in shelving units that are all labeled and stocked with everything she needs. A room that has a door behind which we can shut the mess. 

But this is a dream, not reality.