overwhelmed

Walking into our new home, I knew that I'd feel excited and proud. The feeling I wasn't anticipating was overwhelmed. Having lived in our townhome for 9 years, we knew where everything went, had a home for everything, and had a system for mail, cleaning, etc.

We're starting fresh with our new place. On one hand it's great because it means we can try a new system without the constraints of habit. On the downside (and I'm feeling a lot of the downside now), it means that nothing has a home and that we have piles of mail, trash and orphaned items all throughout the house. It also means that our house is a mess. I know, it hasn't been a week since we moved in, but everything still feels very temporary ... and messy.

I think after all of our planning I expected to walk into our new house knowing where everything should/would go and that after a couple days of unpacking, we'd be good to go. That hasn't been the case. Top that off with a slew of delivery nightmares, puppy problems and some unplanned expenses, our move-in week hasn't been as exciting or smooth as we thought it might be.

Hopefully over the next week things begin to fall into place, until then I'm going to go be overwhelmed on our temporary couch with a glass of wine.

it all started with a coffee table

This coffee table to be exact

Arhaus Dalton Coffee Table

Isn't it beautiful? I absolutely adore it. It's been the constant that we've built our great room, and much of our main level, around. But as beautiful as it is, it's also been a constant headache as we've spent months trying to find furniture to compliment (but not match) it.

It's our first foray into what I've deemed "grown up design," which means we're really designing a room vs. buying a set of furniture from a store. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- our first house was decorated beautifully and we received loads of compliments on our matchy match sets. But for this house, we (ok, I) really wanted to flex our (my) decorating muscle and see how we (I) can make our rooms feel even more chic by buying complimentary vs. matching pieces.

I have to say that I'm super excited about how the great room is panning out. With the few updates to the kitchen we're making we've managed to make a really awesome contemporary meets industrial space. The only hang up for me right now has been the curtains ... and the fact that we can't afford a new dining room set, but back to curtains ... Because the dining room is connected to the great room (see our floor plans), I really think we need to use the same color curtains throughout. The challenge comes in because we're using a darker accent paint color on our two-story fireplace and bringing it into the kitchen and dining room, and I'm really not sure how a charcoal curtain will look on a dark wall, in a small space with our current, dark dining set.

I wish I could figure out a Photoshop mock-up to get some opinions, but the few skills I have aren't cutting it. We're hoping to visit tonight and take pictures so I can attempt to mock-up how it will look, but in the meantime wanted to post one of my favorite things we've bought for our new place.

small spaces and big decisions

You may have noticed in my first post I mentioned quickly selling our townhome and simultaneously signing a contract to build our new place ... which begs the question, where are we living now?

Evan and I are both Colorado natives and incredibly fortunate to still live close to our families. As luck would have it, my Dad is an extremely generous and patient man and invited Evan and I, our dog, Dudley, and a box or two of our things (or 20 and a couch) to stay at his house while our new one was being built. 

It's been a great solution for us as we're not only able to save a boat load of money, but it also gives us a built-in dog-sitter (more on that later) and, most importantly, time to hang out with my Dad.

The downside is downsizing from a 1,700 sq. ft. townhome to a bedroom, bathroom and shared living space (albeit, downside is a relative term considering we have no bills and unlimited wine). We're a little ... cramped, which is leading to daydreaming. Lots of daydreaming. Too much daydreaming.

We've furnished, refurnished and re-refurnished our great room at least 10 times on paper; countless times in our minds. We're fortunate to be able to buy all new furniture for a couple rooms in our house (more on that later too), but our lack of space has somehow brought on indecision and as we're holed up in our bedroom we keep vacillating between this coffee table and that couch, or this couch and that coffee table. 

It's not that we don't have time to finalize these decisions, but I feel like we're living in some decorator's version of "Groundhog Day" and we'll get so sick of trying to make a decision that we won't, and our great room will consist of a whole lotta "great" nothin'. 

At least there's always Pinterest.