Tour de basement - 3

Family room..yeah, we are aware that the tv is from 1992. Working on that!

This part has a little bit more new stuff. Last spring, I loved this blue and white print at Target, and planned on steel-gray walls with everything else blue and white floral - kindof a modern take on vintage blue willow. When I realized that our budget did not involve all new stuff, I abandoned the idea to work with what we already had. However, on a last run to Target in June for things like a shower rod, I found that the blue and white print had gone on deep clearance. While I didn't end up with the whole matchy-matchy line, I bought the pillows for about $7 each and the vase for $4. The paisley chair pad on the rocker was less than $10 at Tuesday morning, and I like how it ties together the royal blue and the the sage green from our couch cover (I wanted to replace this, but those things are darned expensive, and our current one is still in decent shape). The entertainment center and coffee table were the biggest pieces in the room, but together came in under $75 - and I thought my days of "college furniture" were over. Unfortunately, the entertainment center is "expresso" and the coffee table is black, so it's not my ideal, but both were in our extremely limited budget so I went for it. I'm able to camoflauge the shades enough by keeping a small runner on the coffee table. My favorite new piece in this room is the funky modern-and-mission style lamp from Target.

The couch is our old couch from the living room. I can't remember if I blogged about this, but the couch itself was a major headache in this project. Since our plan was to put in a wall (for the bathroom) next to the already very narrow but previously open staircase, we knew that we needed to get the couch downstairs before construction started. And once the couch was in, it would not be going out (same for the bed...the only way these things will come out is with a large saw).

Due to some strange corners in our house, the couch needed to go through a window. So, around 10pm, one of our good friends came over to help Andrew get the couch through the window. Of course it started raining the second the couch was out on our porch. The guys then carried the couch around our house and we started to work the thing down the stairs. But it was stuck. Over the next 2 hours, we managed to saw off all but 1 of the couch's feet. We were so exhausted that we didn't care.

But after a couple of weeks into construction, Andrew and I tried several different methods of giving the couch new feet. And all failed. Finally, our contractor suggested putting 2x4 rails on the sides. Andrew did some excellent carpentry work (we do miss all of the nice tools that were housed in our basement for a couple months!) and now we have the heaviest couch on earth, but also probably the most stable. Which it needs to be, considering the thing will be in our house probably longer than we will.