The Chandelier and the Rug

I feel like a real adult now. Steve and I just purchased our first rug together. It all happened so fast and then BAM! a rug was delivered and we were the owners. We first started looking on overstock.com for styles and patterns that we liked. I was very afraid to commit to anything. I was very comfortable with my beige carpet remnant from college.... hey... i LIKE beige! But we've been gradually trying to distance ourselves from college furnishings, though we do have a lot of hand me down items that i love and I think still work in our home.

A couple of weeks later we were looking around at Crate n Barrel and noticed one of the rugs there was the same as our top picks from Overstock. AND it was double the price at Crate n Barrel. The nice thing is that we were able to see it in person and feel it. So we decided that night to place our Overstock order. It was here within a week.

can you find two cats in this photo?

It is a little bit wild for a beige girl, but I have become used to it. And especially after suffering a seizure after discovering chocolate smeared on one of my couch pillows, I think the bold pattern and brown color palette was a wise choice. (Hopefully there will be children using this rug in a few years!) I also love that it is wool and so soft and luxurious feeling. The cats love it, too. They lay on it all the time. It must feel very warm and cozy to them 'cause i know it feels great on my feet.

The main reason we went to Crate n Barrel was to use this gift card we had received from Steve's work for Christmas 2007. It needed to be used ASAP! It's not good to keep gift cards laying around. As of late, I have acquired a habit of breaking glasses - esp. tumblers. So it seemed a new set of tumblers were in order. We bought these. Also broke a ramekin so I got some fancy new ramekins with a different shape and I really like them. I don't mind have two different kinds of ramekins at the moment, but I imagine after we get the other sets of matching glasses we will get rid of our old Target glasses. I'm hoping we get them (and all the other things I registered for!) as wedding gifts later this year.

And the last, but certainly not the least important home improvement item checked off the list is the dining room chandelier. Here is a photo of it before:

Yes we have lived with this thing for a whole year. I don't mind the brass but combined with the fake oak reminded me of my grandparents trailer in Michigan..... aka not our style. We rent so we could not / didn't want to invest in the installation of a new chandelier. Instead, I managed to take some of the clunky parts off of the existing one, added fluorescent light bulbs (to save energy and so they would not get too hot), and Steve and I somehow squeezed this huge, $7 paper lantern over the entire thing. Now I feel as though we have the moon floating above our dinner conversation every night. How enchanting...