Tuesday, April 24, 2018

One Room Challenge, Week 3 and 4: a new sofa

For week three of the One Room Challenge my kids were on spring break and I thought I'd be able to link up to the ORC a few days late, but alas, apparently not.  For week four I have some sofa updates.




I have wanted a blue velvet sofa for a long time.  I looked around for various ready-made blue velvet sofas, which there are legion, but I had some specific requirements.  It is a small room, so the sofa could not be more than 80 inches long in order to fit between the two end tables.  I wanted a three cushion sofa, which is difficult to find in a smaller apartment size sofa.  I also did not want a lumpy, bad quality sofa.  I am old and need soft cushy sofas for taking naps.

None of the sofas from big box stores fit my requirements.  I could have gone up to 82 inches, but all of the blue velvet sofas I found either did not have three cushions, or were like sitting on cement. 

Instead I decided to recover our Room and Board sofa, which fit all our requirements...but was looking a wee bit worse for wear.


Then one Saturday afternoon I was strolling downtown past a design firm when I happened upon this amazing blue velvet sofa being unloaded into the store.  It was beautiful! It was amazing! It fit all of my requirements! It was $4400!


Sad!

I kept on strolling down the street to my favorite consignment store.  They did not have any blue velvet sofas.  They did, however, have a service where you can order custom sofas, and one of them was a 78 inch english roll arm sofa, and as long as I got a navy blue cotton instead of a blue velvet, it was substantially cheaper than $4400.

That sofa allowed me to pick out fabric for coordinating throw pillows, so I played around with that for quite a while. I ended up picking a navy blue cotton with a greek key design for the sofa, and emerald green throw pillows with welting that matched the sofa.




In the above picture I brought two of my pillows from home...the chiang mai dragon in alabaster (left), and the chiang mai dragon in aquamarine (right).  Although I originally planned the room around the alabaster, I am actually thinking that perhaps the aquamarine might be the direction I'd like to go.  I should probably decide soon considering its Week 4 already.

7 comments:

  1. I love that velvet sofa, but not its price tag!

    When will yours be ready? I love the photo with all of the fabric samples and look forward to seeing more as the room progresses.

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    1. Yeah, that sofa was well out of my price range. The sofa just came, we are enjoying sitting on it! Its not a big room--if I take a pic of it there's the whole reveal!

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  2. We are on some kind of similar wave-length. I am moving to a house half the size of the one I've been living in. The living room is, I guess, apartment-sized. (Less to clean!) I have been saying for years that I want my next house to be a small one, where I could afford to get what I really want because I won't have to get much. Because both of the sofas I currently own are too big for the new house, I get to buy a new one! And I have found myself weirdly, surprisingly (for me, because it's such a departure and something I never really considered until about two weeks ago) drawn to blue velvet sofas.

    Now I see them everywhere.

    I am not sure of what I'm going to get, but I just want to say: I love soft, comfortable sofas. Many of the ones that look beautiful don't feel beautiful. And even though I said I was finally going to get what I really wanted, I, too, have found that there are some real limits to that. No $4400 sofas for me, either.

    But I am going to get something comfortable. And pretty. And not, necessarily, practical. Because life is short and a dream sofa might be not too much to ask of it.

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    1. I hope you will give a new house tour on your blog, when the time comes :-) Fingers crossed your house buying/selling all goes smoothly!

      I love the idea of a smaller house and less to clean, less to pay for, more dearly loved items instead of having to fill rooms. I intended to do that with this house purchase, but buying this house was such a mad scramble (a blog post in itself). I was looking at 3 bedroom, 1200 sq houses and we ended up with a 5 bedroom, 2400 sq ft house.

      I very nearly recovered the Room and Board sofa in blue velvet, but it was more money to recover that already existing sofa in velvet than it was to buy a new down-wrapped, not-in-need-of-repair sofa in cotton. (22 yards of velvet is verrrrry expensive.) I do have a pair of vintage chairs that I hope to get reupholstered in a fancy cobalt blue velvet next year, and since they only require 6 yards of velvet instead of 22, it should be more affordable.

      Get that dream sofa! Emerald or olive green sofas would nicely fit your aesthetic, too.

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  3. Emerald green is my second-favorite choice. :-) And, I'm looking at velvet-like fabrics, which is an acceptable compromise for me. And leather. Basically, I'm still all over the map, which is why I haven't pulled the trigger on anything.

    I totally get how you could end up in a house so different from the one you had in mind. So much depends on what's available during the narrow window in which you have to look. The housing market here is so nuts! I have a friend who spent all of 10 minutes in the house she just bought before she told her realtor to write up the offer. I don't understand how we've created a system in which one of our biggest investments (for many of us)--to mention a purchase that has such an impact on the shape/quality of our lives--is made in the ways in which we do it.

    I am nearly giddy at the thought of how much less house maintaining I will have to do. Heck, I might even have time to write a blog post or two again. :-)

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    1. ooh, a green leather sofa would be awesome. And yes, the housing market totally dictated what we bought--I literally bought the second house that I thought was not a hovel. (I looked at dozens of other filthy, disgusting, on-busy-streets-with-flooding-issues hovels before finding this house. The housing market here is insane.) I saw it twice, for about 20 minutes in total. The Mister didn't even see it at all until he showed up to the closing.

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    2. Wow--but I know what you mean. I was so lucky to get mine--and with a contingency offer. I had to beat out 6 other offers. My realtor couldn't believe it. I did get to see it twice, and though it's not exactly my dream house I'd seen enough to know that the chances of finding something better were slim to none. Your Mister must trust you a lot--or you really know each other's tastes and preferences.

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