Our house is finally "growing up"

If you've been following my blog, you've seen some of the changes that have gone on in the house within the last month or so. I started thinking about our new furniture, and came to the conclusion that I'm just glad that it looks like we have real furniture, even if it is used and cheap. Now some of our friends are at the point in their lives that they are replacing their cheap furniture with quality furniture. I think that's awesome and I know that someday we'll get there, but until then I offer this theory as to why we are only at the cheap furniture stage. Even though we will be 32 this year, we have only been married almost 3 years, so that puts us at the relationship progress point of like 23. He was a bachelor before, and I struggled with money issues (thanks mostly to my ex), so neither of us brought much "good" furniture to the table. He had the nicest stuff, and that's why we have living & dining room furniture that looks like adults. He also had a really nice bedroom suite, but after we bought the house we realized that it wouldn't physically fit in our bedroom so we sold it. We replaced it with furniture from Ikea that we are pretty happy with, even if our bed does sit on the floor like it's in a college apartment. Talk about rolling out of bed. *snicker*

I have found that within my circle of friends, we exchange alot of stuff. We swap, trade, lend, buy, sell, and borrow stuff from each other all the time. Everything is game,clothing, furniture, toys, services & favors. This week for example, I acquired a book shelf for the boys' room to replace their um, "other" one.

Here's a before

And here's an after

I also hung that stupid race track on the wall. It's an interesting "art" piece now, and I don't have to trip over it anymore :)


I have also acquired a real desk for the den/office. Just to refresh your memory, here's a before.

And here's an after

Shocking difference huh? As you can see, I kept the video storage thing with the top on it to hold my cricut. Gone is the diaper box, the garage storage, and the end table on stilts. This desk actually hides our clutter and keeps little fingers off everything. Since I cleaned out the storage closet the other day, I had available space to put what didn't fit in the desk. Just for the record, this space is pretty long. Afterall, it was a garage before. The office & craft area only takes up about half the room, so on the other end is this:

The couches have both been slip covered to protect the innocent, and we have more cheap furniture over there, but it works and looks better than it used to. That really is saying alot, trust me. It's kinda of a throw back to our youth, as we have a console tv, a stereo that has huge speakers (they are floor units on brackets on the wall), and inside that crappy cabinet, 3 different Nintendo systems and an xbox. The Atari lives in the storage closet. Seriously, it does.

I remembered today, that our tv cabinet in the living room was also a freebie from a friend who was moving and didn't have the need for it anymore. Prior to it, the tv sat on one of those little stand things. Sad really. :-P

It's not fabulous, but it was free and it is being used for what it was made for so we are happy with it.


All of our "new" furniture isn't the high end stuff you might see in a magazine, but it's functional and looks ok for the most part. Someday we will get around to replacing it with solid wood pieces, but until then, we will be content in our particle board palace.