We Can't Have Nice Things: My Thrift Store Fail

When Amy and I bought our house 2 years ago, we were in love. It's a lovely 70s split level which, believe it or not, is exactly what we were looking for. (Utah houses have so much square footage eaten up in basements, that are haunted and that no one wants to spend any time in. The split level gives you the chance to actually have basements with windows.)

Anyway, as we started picking decor for the home, we spent a lot of time shopping in vintage and consignment shops. I'm a big believer that the interior of your house should match the exterior and match the place you live in. Nothing drives me crazier that faux-Tuscan villas in Kearns, Utah and Travertine marble bathrooms in Traverse Mountain. Our house was an East Salt Lake split level brick home built in 1969 and I want it to feel like a modern version of that when you walk inside.

Our house has a big loft type room up a few steps from the kitchen which is an office/ library/ TV room/ computer room. It's really big, so we have tried to divide the space up a bit but it can handle some big furniture. So when our favorite vintage store called us to say that they had a peacock blue and green 15 foot sectional, we knew we had to have it. And I love it.

 When we bought it I notice there were a couple of spot where the fabric was wearing a bit thin, but it was a great price and I figured it looked great after being in someones house for the last 40 years, surely we could get another 10 years or so of use out of it and then reupholster it somewhere down the road.

Wrong. We've had the sofa for about a year and my darling children have destroyed it. Why are kids incapable of just sitting on a couch to watch TV? Why must they be doing back flips over the couch and pacing back and forth on top of it and putting the cushions all over the room?? Isn't a cushion more comfortable on the couch? I think the sofa has doubled in weight since we bought it due to the amount of gold fish crackers squished into the cracks. And the cushion now looks like this:

Here's the armrest, close up:

What have those little upholstery monsters done?

I've tried to fix it. I've tried to add stitch-witch where things were fraying and I've ironed patches inside the cushion. But to no avail. And to recover a 15 foot sofa would probably only cost about $5000, plus the cost of fabric, so that's sort of out of the question. So currently the cushion is wrapped in a big purple blanket to protect it from further damage until we can sort out a permanent solution. A friend of mine who is a designer gave us some great ideas on how to make it work without covering the whole sofa, but it's still going to take some money, which there just isn't extra of right now.

And that's what I always wonder when I see those blogs about those amazing houses (usually in Sweden) where the kids wear scarves and play lovingly with carved wooden horses. How do those houses look like that and have children in them at the same time? Somehow those houses always seem have a giant glass sculpture in the middle of the dining room table and all I can think is how that thing would be broken in 10 minutes in my house.

So, we'll probably never be featured in one of those blogs about people who have it all and have amazing houses and smart, well-behaved, wooden-horse playing kids. My kids would break the legs off that wooden horse and then leave it out in the rain where it would become swollen and waterlogged. And if you want to take photos of our amazing 40 year old sofa, you'll have to brush off the pretzel crumbs and crop out the tears holes. But wait until you see our Mediterranean Grotto with all marble tiles. It's amazing.

Part Time Authors vs Pintrest

This week we are taking on the idea that everyone online lives in amazing houses where the edges of everything is fuzzy. Yeah, it's not and we should all stop feeling bad that our houses don't look like this:

And our bathrooms don't look like this:

And our tree houses don't look like this:

It's all too much pressure! So in an effort to expose truth of how we really live, let me introduce you to my new floor.

This year we bought our dream house...literally, it was built in 1956 and they were thinking of us when they built it.  A ghost lady (who first lived in the house) lead us to our home and we are all still waiting to see if she is going to be our families spiritual guide or kill us. But the house needed new floors in the kitchen and dinning room and we knew KNEW KNEW what we wanted and what we wanted was...white.  Bright, clean, modern, it was the perfect thing to update our new 57 year old kitchen.

We stresses about what kind of floor we were going to do for weeks...and I mean we stayed up late, we went to store after store, we trolled Pintrest where we found no less then 3,000 floors we wanted but how to make our own?!

We ended up finding these two tiles that we loved.  One was real white and has a linen texture and the other a warm grey smooth like cement.  We then studied tile patterns for weeks, all I knew was that I wanted timeless and not trendy.

After WEEKS of installing the subfloor then the tile then the grout this is how it shook out:

There it is...and that floor is permanent!  We made sure of that when we cemented down the subfloor straight on to the wood slats of foundation of the house. So after months of thinking we were doing a hounds tooth pattern, because hounds tooth is timeless, we knocked out a chevron floor that is going to be dated in three weeks.  Lucky for us, this floor will last 50 years and chevron is going to be back in a big way in 50 years.

Also...the white...

My friend Brittany begged us not to do white tile floors.  She implored!  When she lived in Germany she had had white tile floors and they were the bane of her existence. But she also had a big ol' dog...we have a little one, so we thought we'd be fine.

We were not.  This lovely floor gets filthy just looking at it.  Turns out, two toddlers and a small dog living in the muddy mountains quickly out dirties some big German dog.  She was right...there it is, in black and white, Brittany-was-right.

Here is a shot of our floor this morning*: My wife will kill me for not tidying up before I put this picture up, but this is in the name of reality so this is what you get...sorry honey.

Now, those are not shadows on the floor above...it's filth of one kind or another, who knows really.  And I will say that this is the only real plus side of our floors, if we couldn't constantly see the crap the was collecting on our floor then we probably wouldn't clean then as often, which only means we would still have gross floors we just wouldn't see them.  So when we clean them, there is a empowering sense that these floors are ah real clean!

So there you have it.  Not real sexy, in fact it's the opposite, we wanted Pintrest floors and we got Livingston floors.  But we did do them ourselves and we worked hard and they are better then the ripped up linoleum we replaced.  But please, don't call them chevron...they are hound tooth.   

*Please note the door missing off the corner cabinet.  When we painted the interior of the cabinet (Pintrest told us we were suppose to) I some how took out that rotating shelf. When I went to put it back, I can't get the door back on because the shelves are now screwed into the wrong place.  Yeah, THAT'S REALITY...put that in your pipe and Pintrest it!