We finally got our new couch and a couple of new chairs for our living room delivered yesterday!  Here’s a picture of them:

Our New Furniture

We think the new furniture looks a lot nicer in the living room than our old couch did, and it’s pretty comfortable too.  The only thing we’re really noticing is how out-of-place all the rest of the furniture in the room looks now that we have the new pieces.  I can’t wait to see how it will look with the new, less-orange, tables when they get delivered tomorrow!

We’re so excited to finally have a couple of furniture deliveries scheduled this week for items we’ve ordered over the last few months.  We have a new sofa and a couple of upholstered chairs coming on Wednesday … and a new coffee table and credenza (for behind the sofa) being delivered on Friday.

The Furniture Being Delivered This Week!!

After this, we’re still waiting for the leather chair and ottoman that’s likely to not be in until next Spring (ug!), a couple more tables that are expected to be in next week, a dining room set that’s supposed to be here just before Christmas, and a couple more upholstered chairs should come the week after Christmas.  We’re so excited to see the new furniture in our house – I hope it looks as good in our house as it did in the stores!!

We ordered some new furniture for our living room back on September 19th.  At the time, they told us that the fabric pieces we ordered would take 60-90 days to come in and the leather chair and ottoman would probably be more like 90-120 days.  Since it had been almost 2 months, I called yesterday to ask about the status of our order and see if they could give me some firmer dates for when our furniture would be in.  Turns out the fabric furniture is in the local warehouse already, but the leather stuff (which wasn’t considered custom) has been back-ordered and probably won’t be in until the end of February or beginning of March – almost 6 months after we ordered it!

Because it’s going to be so long before we’d get the leather furniture, they’re giving us the option to take the same chair and ottoman in a lighter brown color.  They have the chair in the lighter color in the local warehouse already, but we’d still have to order the ottoman and that would still take until the end of February to come in, so I’m not sure we’ve gained much.

Even for the fabric furniture, which is already here (actually a little ahead of schedule), it sounds like it will be a couple weeks before it will be delivered … and that’s if I go in tomorrow to pay the balance for that furniture.  Once I pay for the rest of it, they said they’d release the order to the warehouse.  Then, within 3-5 business days, I should expect to receive a phone call from the warehouse manager who will schedule delivery sometime in the following 5-10 business days.  That means there’s still a chance we won’t have the furniture before Thanksgiving … and it’s probably no more than 10 miles from our house right now!  Insane!

I think the thing that bothers me the most about the whole thing is that every other industry is working to become more efficient and speed up their manufacturing and delivery time – except for the furniture industry.  It doesn’t seem to matter where you order it from or how custom it is – it just takes forever … and even when the furniture comes in, it’s likely to have something wrong with it.

We’re still deciding what to do about the leather chair & ottoman that won’t be in until February/March.  Even if we cancel the order and go find something we like at another furniture store, we’re starting the process all over again – and it might still be February before we actually get the furniture …  Ug.

After being in our house for about 2 years and having basically no furniture in our living room during that time, we finally decided it was time to start furniture shopping.

Our living room is pretty large (about 30′ long x 16′ wide), but really long and narrow with lots of doorways that make furniture placement a challenge, so I started by putting together a floorplan for the room to have a better idea of the size and scale of furniture that would work in the space.  Here’s the plan I came up with:

Floor Plan for Living Room

We’ll have a small, apartment-size sofa (about 78″ in length) and a pair of chairs in front of the fireplace with a coffee table in the middle and a sofa table behind the couch for lamps and a little additional storage.  Since the room is so narrow and there are doors on either side of the fireplace that require us to leave a couple of paths through the room, we had to pick some smaller pieces for this conversation area.  On the right side of the diagram (the front of the house), we’ll have a chair and ottoman in front of the built in display cabinets to add some additional seating and we’re planning to move the piano to this half of the room as well where it will fit better along the wall common with the family room.  On the left side of the diagram (back of the house), we’re thinking of having a standard height table large enough for playing board games or reading a newspaper, with a couple of upholstered chairs that will be easy to reposition around the table.  We’re also thinking of having some taller bookshelves / display cabinets to help balance out the built ins on the other side of the room.

We already had the piano, but all of the other pieces in the floor plan are things we needed to shop for, so we started looking around at the local furniture stores a month or so ago and we finally decided on some upholstered furniture that we thought would be the right size/scale for the room.  Here are some pictures of the pieces we bought:

New Furniture for Living Room

The new apartment-size sofa (upper left) will be covered in a brown linen fabric that’s a little darker in person than it looks in the picture.  The matching chairs (upper right) will be covered in a coordinating textured fabric that’s a blend of tan and ivory.  We also purchased a dark brown leather chair and ottoman that will go in front of the display cases and some coordinating pillows in the fabric on the lower left.

Everything we bought is pretty neutral, but I think it will look nice in our living room once it finally comes in.  We were really hopeful that we would have the furniture before Christmas, maybe even in time to have a Christmas party now that we’ll have places for people to sit, but it sounds like it will be a good 60-90 days before we should expect to receive the new furniture, so we might be lucky to have it by Christmas.  We’re still working to pick out some coordinating tables and a couple more chairs.  Hopefully we can get those on order soon as well!

About a month ago (I’m so behind in posting!), we bought a new buffet for our dining room.  It’s part of the Canopy collection of assemble-it-yourself furniture at Wal-Mart and it’s actually called an “Anywhere Console”.

New Buffet for Dining Room

At first, we were a little leary about purchasing something like this at Wal-Mart, but it seemed like it was pretty good quality and the price was right, so we thought we’d give it a try.  Overall, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the furniture.  It’s constructed of solid wood, so it’s a really substantial, sturdy piece of furniture, and the finish is very rich.  The fine print on the assembly instructions said it was made by Sauder, but it seems a lot nicer than any of the other Sauder furniture we’ve ever had.  Assembly was pretty unique – the whole thing went together with just a hammer and a block of wood.

So far, it’s provided some much-needed storage for our “good” china, which had previously been taking over the kitchen cabinets.  We weren’t sure how much weight the shelves would be able to support, so we decided it was best to not load them up with stacks of heavy plates, but there’s still a lot of room for completer pieces and some of the smaller dishes.

The Inside of the Buffet Cabinet

The buffet also came with two additional drawers that can be used in place of having the two shelves in the middle.  I liked the idea of using the shelves to display some of our dishes now since we don’t have a glass china cabinet, but figured if we ever move the cabinet to another room, the drawers will help it feel more like a console table and less like a buffet.

We haven’t had it long enough to really be able to comment on how well it holds up, but from everything we’ve seen so far, we’d highly recommend it.  It looks really good without costing much at all.

About a year ago, we painted and got new furniture for our sun room, which we’re now using as a family room.  The new furniture has worked out great and we really enjoy having a TV room on the main floor of the house, but the room has never quite felt “finished”.  So, this week, I placed an order for a few more smaller pieces of furniture to place along the walls and in the corners of the room to help make it feel more complete.

Leaning Bookshelves

The first pieces we purchased were the 25.5″ Leaning Bookshelves from JCPenney.  I’ve liked this style of shelf for a while because it’s so airy and seems like it won’t take up so much visual space in the room, but most of the ones we see are too wide to fit the space in the sun room.  At 25.5″ wide, these are just the right size to fit between the patio doors and the corners of the room, with one shelf placed on each side of the door.  I’m still a little concerned about the quality of the shelves, but since we plan to use them just for pictures and other decorative items that won’t be as heavy as books, I’m hoping we won’t have a problem.  The reviews on JCPenney’s website indicated that the shelves in the espresso finish (the color we ordered) seem to be of higher quality materials than the same shelves in a black finish.  It seems a little strange to me that the material would be different based on the color, but I’m still hopeful that we’ll be happy with the quality when we receive them.

Accent Table

I also ordered an 18″ diameter accent table from Target for placing in an opposite corner of the room.  It will be just the right size to tuck into the corner and hold a smaller potted plant or two that are now awkwardly sitting on the floor.  My only concern with this piece is that the wood color blends well with the color of the rest of the furniture in the room (which I’m hoping shouldn’t be a problem since there are multiple wood tones in the table top).

I haven’t received shipment notifications on either one yet, so it’s probably wishful thinking that they’ll be here by the end of this week, but I can’t wait to get everything assembled to see how it looks in the room.  Hopefully we won’t be disappointed!

The patio furniture we ordered for our deck arrived this morning. After about 4 hours of work to assemble everything, it’s definitely looking like a big improvement over the empty deck we had when we started.

We ordered the 7-piece dining set, 2 chaise lounges, and a set of nesting tables from the River Stone Collection and the 4-piece seating set from the Buckingham Collection – all from Sears. Everything came with some assembly required, but none of it was that difficult. The instructions were pretty clear – it probably took us longer to unwrap everything and clean up all of the packing material than it did to actually put everything together.

We need to work on arranging everything some more – I think the chaise lounges may wind up moving out to the pool area and we need to find a new home for the grill, but here are some pictures:

I placed an order tonight for a couple of deck boxes too. We ordered the Suncast DB9750 Ultra-Large Storage Bench, which will go on the deck and hold the cushions for the seating set when it’s not in use (to keep them from getting nasty and wet when it rains). The other deck box is a Suncast DB7000W Deck Box with Wheels that we’ll put out by the pool to store the chemicals and pool accessories in. It’ll be so nice when they come – our back porch is getting awfully crowded with us trying to store everything there!

We’ve been looking all over at patio furniture ever since the displays started going up in the stores a month or so ago, trying to decide what would be the best combination of things to put on our large side-deck, the smaller, tiled patio off of the sun room, and the deck area around the pool. We’ve basically come to the conclusion that, while we like all of the more expensive furniture very much, we’re going to need a lot more for those three spaces than what we’d want to spend. So, we’d been talking about buying some really inexpensive stuff to start with, just so the deck, patio, and pool area won’t be empty and then accumulate some of the nicer things over time.

This weekend, though, I think we found the perfect mix of not-so-expensive but nice-looking patio furniture. When we came home, I looked it up on-line and found those prices to be $150 or so cheaper than in-store, so I placed the order last night and scheduled a home delivery for next Sunday. We ordered a table that seats six, 2 matching lounge chairs with a set of nesting tables to go between them, and a set of PVC “wicker” furniture. I think all of the furniture will probably fit on our deck (and hopefully fill it out nicely), but the chaise lounges will probably find a home by the pool and the wicker furniture may migrate to the patio, depending on where we find we’re spending most of our time.

I still need to find a large deck box that we can use to store the cushions for the wicker furniture in while its not in use so they won’t get wet and nasty when it rains. I’m thinking we’ll probably wind up with a Suncast or Rubbermaid one since those seem to get pretty good reviews and will probably do a good job of keeping water out. I really like the way some of the wooden ones look, but they aren’t completely weather-proof, which I think is a requirement. I’ve still got a week or so to figure it out, though, so no major rush. I’m just excited to have the furniture on its way – it’ll be so much nicer to spend time relaxing outside once there’s actually a place to sit down!

Over the last couple of weeks, the furniture we ordered for our sun room back in January has trickled in and everything has finally been delivered. We’re really happy with everything, with the exception that the couch should have had three cushions instead of two. We’re working with the store on it and it sounds like they’ll be re-ordering a new one for us next week, which we should hopefully have in another month or two. Here are some pictures:

We also wound up buying a new LCD television for the room last weekend. It’s a 46″ Sony, model # KDL-46XBR4, which we’ve been really happy with so far. The picture looks pretty good, even without an HD signal, and there’s only a minimal amount of reflection on the screen, which is something we were pretty concerned about given the large number of windows and doors in the room. We currently have the TV hooked up to the home theater PC we built a few weeks ago and it’s been working out well so far. The wireless-N network we’re using to stream our recorded television content has been performing really well, with no skips. We still need to get a remote control working with it (so we don’t have to use the keyboard to drive the TV anymore), but it’s pretty much done otherwise.

We still need to hang some pictures on the walls and I’m planning to get a bunch of green plants to fill in the corners of the room that are basically empty now, but we’re excited about the transformation so far and about spending more time in a room that we basically haven’t used since we moved in last fall.

I called yesterday to get an update on our furniture order for the sun room. The tables and television stand were delivered a couple weeks ago and the rest of the furniture was supposed to be here by the middle of March. I talked to our decorator yesterday and it sounds like our sofa is in, but the rest of the furniture won’t be here until the end of the month. The couch has been sent to the delivery company, so hopefully we’ll hear from them sometime soon so we can schedule the delivery. I’m really looking forward to being able to spend more time in the sun room once we actually have furniture!