I can feel myself getting a cold, but I think I might be giving it the good fight. I am at home, getting up to clean for five minutes, sitting down for ten.
So I'm trying to make my house look like grown ups live here, instead of a bunch of college kids living here having keggers on the weekend.
Ok, maybe the kegger thing isn't too far from the truth at times, but it doesn't have to look that way.
It needs to look like it's a family house, with nice things. I'm so tired of mismatched furniture, some left over from when we bought our first house and we were flat out broke. For example, I just got a beautiful new coffee table set. A nice wooden set, three pieces that ACTUALLY MATCH! I was finally able to throw out the old end table we had, (the only one left from a set we bought some 8 or 9 years ago at Walmart) that had loose screws, and that bad plastic-fake wooden covering.
In the past, even when we have bought new furniture, we haven't always had much luck in getting nice things that stand the test of time. We bought a new couch, loveseat and sofa chair about 4 years ago. It's a tan coloured microfiber. We went with microfiber, because the salesman told us that our sweet, lovely little cat, Silver, would not scratch it. Told us that she would not scratch it because it heats up and feels sort of like carpet burn on their paws, so they won't do it again.
Man, he was full of shit.
Even as I am writing this, she is doing her crazy sideways exorcist crawl moves across the bottom of that chair.
Idiot.
Not only has our demon cat shredded the bottom of my sofa chair, (The same sofa chair that boasts my children's artwork all over the back of it from when my kids were small), but the damn thing is so hard to keep clean. Maybe it was never scotch-guarded Maybe it wasn't meant for people with kids. Maybe it wasn't made for grown ups like us who eat most of our meals sitting on it. (Ok, edit: The last three nights that we have eaten a meal together in this house, it has been at the table. We're not [always] savages.)
Even a big black-hole powered super wet vac with the strongest upholstery cleaner can't take out some of these stains.
And to top it all off, the cushions are not actually attached to the couch, so every time you stand up, it gets sucked into your butt cheeks, pulling them out. Every time.
So tonight I was fluffing the new throw pillows I have, and putting them on my couch. They are nice and big, so as to cover as much of this shit couch as possible. And I have a thought.
It is amazing what some nice throw pillows can do.
So that sounds so, uninspiring. That is, until you really stop and think about it.
The house itself is like my family. Everything that you really need. The walls for support. The roof to keep us safe from the storms that may rage outside. The heat to keep us cozy. All you ever really need in life.
It's not about the throw pillows, it's never about that stuff. That is just that - stuff. It's not the throw pillows that are important, it's all about the structure of the house.
But it's when you add the throw pillows and the pictures on the walls, and the nice new wooden matching coffee table sets, that life gets interesting. That's when life gets a little prettier.
The throw pillows are the picnics in the back of our SUV with the kids. They are the marshmallow roasts in the backyard. They are the ice cream dates at Dairy Queen.
Ok, wait. That all included food.
Let me try that again.
The throw pillows are umm...ok, wait, I got this.
They are the tickle fights on our bed. They are movie dates on the couch. They are reading Harry Potter together. They are tossing a football in our cul-de-sac. And they are cuddling, four people deep, on the loveseat before bed.
Have I mentioned that I just love the new throw pillows?
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