We’ve been Slipcovered!

It’s been a while, and boy have I been busy! Truthfully, most of my energy the past couple of months has gone to growing this little baby inside of me. I began this pregnancy feeling alright and have maintained a positive attitude throughout most of it. Then month eight hit and I couldn’t be more DONE!! This baby is super active- more than my first two and I feel like I have been growing the largest baby known to man. Maybe it is just me, because I’m older, because I have two little ones that I am also caring for, but I cannot wait to be done carrying this little bundle of joy!

This is me three weeks ago, when this was still fun:

We are thrilled to have a third child, AND a little boy. It’s exciting and mysterious all at the same time. I have not had the privilege of growing up with brothers, so this boy thing is all new to me. My husband is thrilled, finally he will have someone to relate to in the house besides the cat, his other male counterpart (and sworn enemy).

Meanwhile, I’ve been nesting! I have just two weeks till this baby is due, and I have been busy preparing and trying to get all of my summer projects wrapped up. And what do you know? It’s already November! Between trying to finish tiling our bathtub surround, a few small building projects, and sewing Halloween costumes, this baby is a ticking time bomb!

I can’t believe how fast things have flown by, especially the way my pregnancy has seemed to be dragging. My body just doesn’t want to cooperate anymore, and that has made it all the more frustrating for me. I have slowly been losing the ability to bend and carry things and take deep breaths. And don’t even get me started on the awesome feeling of the baby “dropping” this past week. That was a pain I have never known with my previous two babies. Seriously, I spent some late nights googling whether I was dying because my pelvic bone was saying otherwise.

Anyway, I mentioned earlier this summer that I purchased fabric to slipcover our sofa. I finally gave up on having a white couch and found a nice shade of brown to compliment the hands and feet and food that accumulate on everything around here. Well, it’s done! After the fabric mocking me from it’s spot in the corner of the room throughout my morning sickness phase and my busy summer months of outdoor activities, I finally got around to it and started sewing.

September meant much progress and that nagging feeling of stuff I wasn’t going to get done started to lift. As soon as the slipcover was finished, I had a startling reality check:

Everything, and I mean E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. in my living room is BROWN!!

How did this happen? I mean, I like the color brown, but once that sofa started staring back at me, I realized I was swimming in a sea of brown. We’ve got brown wood floors, brown rugs, brown end tables and a cocktail table, brown pillows, brown television stand, picture frames….the list goes on. I realized just how much that white (albeit dirty most of the time) sofa really helped to lighten the space and provide a contrast to the otherwise wood-toned shade known as my living room.

And it’s not just the brown. A few years back, I chose a lovely color to paint my formerly green living room (which I loved) to a more neutral wheaty shade I had picked out. I carried around that paint chip for months, and when I happened on a five gallon bucket of mis-tint paint, I was lucky enough to get the guy in the paint dept. to tint it to match my dream color.

Only it wasn’t.

Once I started painting, I thought it looked great. Then when I finished the first wall, I realized I took a wrong turn. It wasn’t a match. The paint guy had worked his magic, but he just couldn’t get the right tint with the base that was already in the bucket. I went from a soft wheat color with yellow undertones to a peachy shade that I begrudgingly call “Covergirl Creamy Natural.”

It’s reminiscent of the makeup I wore in high school. It’s heavy and dark and has great orange undertones that make me angry when I stare too long. In certain light, I can manage, but in 20 of the 24 hours in a day, it looks like stomach acid. If you follow Melissa over at The Inspired Room, you know it is the same feeling she gets when she talks about her beloved builder shade of paint she affectionately refers to as “swine.” It IS that bad.

Having a dark colored sofa in the room again has only made me realize just how dark the walls really are. I am a light and bright person, and our house is small and boxy and does not provide a lot of natural sunlight. It’s something I have battled since day one; trying to find this balance between having light furnishings or rooms, yet still maintain the practicality of having to live in them.  I’ve added mirrors everywhere to reflect as much light as I possibly can, to no avail. I made several attempts today to photograph my living room; I bounced the flash off of my ceiling for more light, I edited the crap out of my photos to make them look brighter, yet still, this dark room just won’t cooperate!

I grew up in a house with a mom who didn’t have much interest in decorating. Our house was the same shade of white my entire life, not a wall painted, and in my teen years my mom finally splurged and painted our entire new house in a pale shade of grey. So wouldn’t you know, the first thing I was dying to do when I finally had my own home was add color! Over the years, I have experimented with red walls, gold walls, orangey Tuscan walls, green walls, periwinkle walls, and now I am finding that I want to go back to shades of white. I like the neutrality that a light colored wall brings into a space to make the other elements pop. I like how it transitions well with the seasons, and makes my special pieces stand out. And most of all, it reflects all that sunshine I have been missing!

So, as soon as we fitted the new slipcover on, my husband, yes, my Male-who-could-care-less-about-color-husband said, “Wow. It sure is dark in here. Everything is brown. And these walls are so dark. I think they need a lighter color.” Nevermind that I have been saying how much I hate the wall color for the past four years, that was the day that he finally “got me.”

So add that to the list of things I want to get done before the baby is born. I am now heading into “Operation De-Brownify the Living Room.”

This will not be an easy task. It will require many hours of deliberation. Much planning. Careful execution with very limited resources. Late nights on pinterest. Many trips down the paint aisle. Lots of looking through magazines and googling.

Lucky for me, those are all things I like and I have already put some of my plans into action.

First, I found a great deal on some silvery blue curtain panels at Lowes. I took down my old tan curtains (yes, even the curtains were a shade of brown!) and threw the new ones up. I like them, but the icy blue just highlights the orangeyness of the wall color that they rest against.

I found some new throw pillows with a little more color. Now that I have a dark sofa, the lighter pillows really pop off of the dark background. I found a couple online at Kirkland’s and bought them with a gift card I won earlier this summer from Jessica at Mom4Real. I like them. However, I need to make bolder choices, and not with pillows.

My husband’s sheer hatred of my mass of throw pillows brings out his inner nasty and literally drives him to a level of rage I am not comfortable with. Remember the scene from “A Christmas Story” when the furnace breaks and Dad goes downstairs to battle the beast? That’s Sam when he has to dig his way into the couch or bed at night. It’s those muffled cartoony cussing sounds you hear from the other room followed by pillows everywhere.

I even hide them.

I have at least five or six pillows on each sofa, one on all the chairs, and about a half dozen shoved in the storage cubby under our bed. And that’s not counting the pillows on top our our bed. I am ashamed to say it, but there are ten.

Yes. Ten.

This scene never made him feel more understood: