It still feels very unreal. It doesn’t feel like our place yet. We love it, and feel so very fortunate and blessed to finally be here.

More later when I can blog from my laptop!

I pick up a 17 foot moving van in just over an hour. Half of our belongings are in a movable storage pod that will be delivered to the house in the morning. The other half are stuffed in my parents’ garage. Those have to be transferred into the moving van, and then moved into the new house. In hindsight, I wish I had gotten two storage pods, since that only has to be loaded and unloaded one time. Super simple.

I’m hiring help to get everything in the house, so I’ve been messing around with floor plans online. Movers aren’t cheap, so I need to direct them to the right location for the furniture instead of fussing around with placement the day of the move. However, I didn’t measure any of my furniture before it went into the storage pod, since we were in such a rush to clear out of the old house. So, all the furniture placement plans I have may go out the window on Saturday if my stuff if significantly larger than I remember.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a sofa on Craigslist. The first stop with the moving van later is to pick that up. I already paid, and the seller agreed to store it for me. Then, I have a Danish mid century dresser that I’ve also already paid for at a consignment store that I have to go get. All this planning has been going on forever, and I’m excited to actually get everything on its way to where it’s supposed to go.

I’m going to be a nervous, excited, very busy person for the next few days. Starting in about an hour. I can’t wait!

Then I found vinyl plank flooring. I was debating between the much more expensive and much more difficult to install click version, and the glue-together floating option which is super easy to install. Leaning towards the cheaper version, simply for ease of installation more than anything, I found that it was the Special Buy of the Day at Home Depot today. Hooray!

The daily deal discounted it to $1.49 a square foot, plus there was free shipping. I saved a total of $308! And it’s only going to cost $882 to floor the entire lower level of the house (minus the bathroom).

I was leaning toward Barnwood before, and this Country Pine has a very similar look.

We do our final walkthrough in three days, and close in four. Counting down!

It’s possible that I have the mental and emotional maturity of a baby playing peek-a-boo. Or maybe a teenager. Seeing beyond this moment is so difficult. Yes, we really should have a home of our own in 5 more days, but even that small amount of time is kind of incomprehensible to me. I can’t really explain it, but it truly has felt like the move will never really happen this entire time. By the time our beds are in place next weekend, it will have been an entire month since we slept in them.

Luckily the actual children in the house are handling the uncertainty and waiting with less impatience than my husband and me. And I have to say that this waiting period has actually been a nice time. We’ve stayed with my parents, and we’ve all had a nice time visiting and being together. I’ve had less responsibility and fewer bills.

I’ve almost finished painting the patio furniture. I ended up going with orange cushions. This seat is so comfy now, and I can’t wait to enjoy it on my very own patio!

My first Craigslist find was a wooden patio set for our new covered patio. I’ve lost the photo of it all together in the listing, but here’s a before shot of the love seat. Well, it’s after I sanded the original paint off a bit:

The set also came with two chairs and a coffee table. It’s all in various stages of progress. There has been a lot of rain on and off, and I’m working on it outside, so that’s slowed me down a lot. Plus, I definitely underestimated the difficulty of sanding and painting all of those slats. Here’s the love seat at the moment, still showing some primer:

And this is the ikat print cushion that I found for the seating:

I’m using all oil-based products to paint this set, after having had terrible results with latex paint peeling off outdoor furniture in the past. I love how smooth the oil-based paint goes on. It evens out beautifully with no brush strokes. If I weren’t using cheapo foam brushes on the primer layer to save money, it would look even better. The green is one of the Pantone colors they’re featuring at Lowes. I love how the bright green looks out in the grass.

Yesterday, I got a spider lamp for $30 through Craigslist that looks like this one, except that one arm was broken and we had to remove it:

And lastly, I even finally found a sofa on Craiglist! It comes from a very clean home, so I’m not worried about it being used. It cost me about half of what a new one on sale at the furniture store cost. Here’s the photo from the Craigslist listing:

All of these purchases are actually the first furnishings I’ve ever gotten through Craigslist. I’ve sold a lot on there very easily, but up until now I’d only purchased our dog Oliver through the site. He’s still the best Craigslist find ever.

We’re getting closer to finally owning our new home. One week from tomorrow!!!

Earlier this year when I decorated the Studio Calico office, I totally depleted the local supply of mid century goodies. Plus, I bought every last globe in town! I’ve since gone thrifting and haven’t found a single thing worth bringing home. Which is probably good, because my home until now didn’t really need me to bring anything new (or should I say old) into it.

Our first stop was the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. I’ve found some really great stuff there in the past, including a Lane surfboard coffee table for $35. Honestly, all shopping trips since then have been in the hopes that I would find another table just like that one for my house. No coffee tables yesterday, but I did get to buy this amazing chair there for 20% off of $45. Apparently there was another one very similar to it in white vinyl that already sold. Note to self: visit this store more often and don’t let future finds go to anyone but me!!!

The vinyl is in perfect shape. Finding vintage chairs that don’t have to be reupholstered is the best! I’m planning to put it where the orange chair is in this living room mockup. I also got a mid century triangle table that is probably going to go next to it. Photos of that coming next time, maybe. Everything I bought is currently jammed into my parents’ dining room, so it’s pretty hard to photograph. In case you are just joining me, we are living with my parents since our house closed 6 days after we got an offer, and our new house isn’t ready to close yet. (Well, we are ready to close, with a fully ready loan, but the current owners want their full 45 days to move.)

I bought THREE other chairs, which I’ll also show you later. Plus, I splurged on this beautiful dresser. Well, at $165 at a consignment store it felt very spendy, but I know that it actually was quite a deal. It’s going to be sort of an entertainment unit in the front living room. You can’t really tell much from this photo, but it’s very low, like a credenza. Thankfully, the store agreed to store it in the back AND deliver it for me when we’re in the house. Otherwise, I would have had to walk away from it.

I’m still on the lookout for some more stuff. Both the living room and the den need floor lamps – at least one per room – since neither of those rooms has a ceiling light. I still need a coffee table for the front living room. With all the mid century wood pieces going on, I’d probably prefer something more industrial so the place doesn’t start to look like a time capsule. The biggest purchase on the horizon is a sofa for the den. Sofas are so much harder to find used, if you’re picky about shape and upholstery. For the time being, that room may be a room of all chairs. But we’re a cuddly family, and we’ve been needing a sectional for a while, since everyone can’t fit on our existing sofa at one time. I’m about to Google which thrift stores are open on Sunday.

The furniture is not certain – but it’s the general vibe I’m going for, and there was a photo of it all together at CB2 that fit really well into the room I’d worked up here.

Now:

The Future:

It’s concrete slab down there, so my default choice of real wood was out due to moisture concerns. I considered tile, since it’ll pretty much last forever. But tile floors in a living area are too Florida-ish for me. The wood-look tile planks look pretty awesome. But they’re a bigger financial investment than wood floors would be (when you include installation), and I started to get cold feet about spending that much cash on something that’s really fake. I mean, it’s tile, but it’s pretending to be wood. Would I regret that in a few years?

I also really like the look of polished concrete. But considering that the carpet-covered concrete subfloor from 1972 probably has a lot of aesthetic issues, including glue, it would likely not be a cheap alternative. I’ve been reading about refinishing concrete floors, and the grinders they use create a TON of dust. Apparently all the plastic in the world doesn’t prevent it from getting everywhere. I’m not sure I’m up for that kind of mess and investment in concrete floors.

So all of that brings me back to what I originally thought we’d end up doing, but have resisted because it’s the most fake option of them all. Pergo. We finally went and looked at laminate flooring at Lowes today. I was impressed! The wall samples seriously looked real, and I was trying to figure out if some of them were real wood. Nope – all laminate. Not only were they affordable and good-looking, but the installation is on sale for 99 cents a square foot through July. Hooray!

Here’s the floor we have chosen, at least for the moment. It’s Pergo Max Handscraped Heritage Hickory. (Note that I am not, not, not getting compensated in any way by Lowes or anyone for linking up to that floor.)

Want to see the den where these new floors will be laid? The house isn’t ours yet, so this is how the room looks at the moment.

Now, for that second view, take a look at this image I found online, which I can’t seem to trace back to a source other than Pinterest:

Wouldn’t that be a nice way to handle the drop to the lower level? Yeah, I hope that someday I can bring you something equally lovely that’s a photo from my actual house. I’m excited!

Lastly, for tonight, I just had to go ahead and stick some white subway tile in that image of the kitchen I’ve been messing around with in Photoshop. For reference, so you don’t have to click back to my last post, this is what the kitchen currently looks like:

Now, my updated digital redo:

I’m planning to use these tiles from Home Depot, which are just $2.65 a square foot.

Before the night is up, I’ll probably have some virtual flooring laid in the den. Be back soon!

When I decorated the Studio Calico office building, I carefully planned each room. When possible, I even went so far as to do detailed virtual mock-ups of the furniture in the rooms. When I purchased big-ticket items for the rooms, I was generally really certain that those pieces would work.

I’ve never done that kind of planning in my own living space. But this time, I’m trying it out. For starters, I’m working on paint colors.

In the kitchen, I want to do the wall above the chair rail in a dark gray. Below the chair rail, I’m planning on white. Beyond that, I plan to not have curtains in the small window above the sink, to let in maximum light.

So here’s my virtual attempt at doing that:

The kitchen as it looked on our last walk-through:

How I imagine it to be, as a blank slate, ready for accessories:

I also want to do small white subway tile on the back splash. They sell a miniature version at Home Depot that comes in 12×12 sheets. I think it would work well, since the space is pretty small and wouldn’t allow many rows of the standard size.

While tiling a back splash is a pretty cheap project, it’s the tile cutting that will cause me to put it off. Look at that tiny space between the bottom of the window and the top of the counter. Do I have to cut tiny tile slivers for that? Eek!

I’ll keep working on all of this during the days and days I still have to wait before I get possession of the house. Be back soon.

This was the view in my living room on Tuesday before I walked out the door for the final time. The seven days before that moment were unexpected and frenzied, and I’m both thankful that it happened and thankful that it’s over.

We got an offer on our house last Tuesday, the same day I posted here on the blog about how hard it was to wait for it to sell. I definitely didn’t have to wait much longer! By Wednesday morning, we had an agreed upon contract. On Wednesday afternoon, a portable storage pod was delivered in our driveway. And then, bright and early Thursday morning, all of our furniture went onboard the pod. Less than 24 hours after the contract was finalized, we didn’t have beds in our rooms anymore. Crazy!

The days after the big furniture move-out were filled with hours and hours and hours of packing and hauling boxes into my parents’ garage. I couldn’t see an end to it. All I knew was that if I simply kept packing one box after another, that eventually it all had to come to an end…someday. Thankfully, friends showed up to help me pack some of the toughest areas (kitchen and garage), and they kept me from melting in a puddle of tears during it all.

We had purged our stuff multiple times over recent months, loading up the trash and taking carloads to Goodwill. We weren’t even planning to move – we just needed more space in our small home. Last week, I was so thankful we’d done all of that. There was absolutely no more room in either the pod or my parents’ garage when we finished moving out. And the sidewalk in front of the house was stuffed with an embarrassing amount of large trashbags. Had we not majorly pared down already, those last days of moving would have been much more complicated.

Yesterday morning was the first time I haven’t owned a home since January 2004. Yep, we actually have zero homes at the moment. All along, I had figured we would have two to manage! Our new home won’t be vacant until mid-June. We are so fortunate that my parents live here in town and have graciously agreed to let two adults, two rambunctious children, and a dog come crash at their house.

And now we wait. When we were trying to sell the house, I worked day and night to clean and improve the space, hoping that my efforts would result in a faster sale. But nothing I can do at the moment can convince the people we are buying from to let us close the sale any earlier on their house. Unlike us, it seems that they prefer a more leisurely pace of moving to their next home. I can’t blame them, but I do wish they’d hurry!