remodeling this life

I am all about getting rid of stuff that I don’t need. But I am all for getting things that I do need. And I have needed a coffee table for a while – since we moved. Our old coffee table has been passed on to my parents and currently resides in a storage unit near where they’re having a new cottage built. I come by my love of home building and remodeling honestly. Wanna see it? It’s pretty cool. They tore down the old one that I grew up visiting every weekend and the new one should be done in a couple of months. And my old coffee table will live there!

So for a while, I haven’t had one. I used a steamer trunk for a while but got tired of that and sold it. And kept waiting for the right thing to come along. Hubby did some work for his boss on his laptop – hubby’s expertise is in computers but he works in golf course maintenance – that’s another post all on it’s own. And instead of paying him, his boss gave him the coffee table and end table that he was going to get rid of anyway. And since they’re Pottery Barn, well, I didn’t argue.

They arrived on Saturday and I had fun playing with everything around the room. Drew helped. The fun thing about 3 year olds is that they say stuff like “There is a drawer in this coffee table. You can put your clothes in here so you don’t have to go *all* the way to your bedroom if you want to change”. As if, first, our house is so big I wouldn’t dream of walking all that way, and second, I’d ever just change in the living room on a whim.

She helped me arrange some flowers and such and we had a good old time making the room cozy, adding some *gasp* faux flowers (the horror!) and some new throw pillow covers

My mom just returned from a vacation in France and got me 2 pillow covers. She knows me so well. I had talked to her about wanting to make some of my own but she knows I’m lazy and not all that crafty and it would take me forever to actually do it. So she gave me these as a gift when she got back. They’re straight from Nice. Nice, huh? I love them (well, it…if we’re talking the singular as in I only took a picture of one of them because Drew is on the couch using the other one at the moment so it wasn’t ready for it’s close-up). ANd I hope that my friend Lisa recognizes the flowers in the background. Those 4 wood flowers have graced my home for 3 years now – across the country and in 2 homes and many places throughout, they’re my daily reminder of a fabulous friend and her love.

For Valentine’s Day, hubby arranged for me to go to a local nursery and pick some stuff out for our yard. I picked a fabulous avocado tree and a lemon tree and can’t wait until I can eat avocados and make lemonade from them. I also picked out an anthurium for inside along with a lovely pot to put it in and a base for that. I really like how they look in the room and make it that much cozier.

Some other changes have been made to the living room this weekend including a new (to us) coffee and end table. More on that tomorrow…