First of all, let me apologize… I’ve been remiss in posting this week. Blame this on the death cold that has taken over my body. It started last Thursday night with a seriously sore throat, was followed on Friday morning by a ear, throat and back ache, then turned into a brutal cold over the weekend (as I was trying to entertain friends at the lake). Since getting back to Vancouver, it’s turned into a chest cold that has me up coughing in the night.

Combine the cold with being behind on my work, and unfortunately I just ran out of steam to write content for this blog!

But, back to business. This is how the living room looked last time you saw it.

A living room complete with laundry on the couch… not much gets better than that people!

And you’ll have to get to the bottom of this post to see how it is looking today; but right before we left for Edmonton, this is how it was looking:

This picture shows off 1) the little green chair (a $75 craigslist splurge, but it’s cute and it rocks—literally), 2) the awesome blue scallop Urban Outfitters rug (which is the only new thing in the living room, and is not well centred in this iteration of the room), and 3) the fancy pants entertainment unit (an $80 craigslist deal-of-the-century, that sells for $400 new at The Brick).

I was quite excited when we found this entertainment unit. We’d been looking to replace the ugly white bookshelf for over a month. And this is where all the entertainment happens. Our TV (yet another craigslist purchase) is plugged into our Mac mini. Having a computer instead of cable is just about the best thing to happen to my TV/entertainment time. It’s perfect for TV and movie streaming and gaming.

Pretty sweet for $80 if I do say so myself. Also, my pants cost $5.99.

But the living room was still looking a little bare. So up next? Throw pillows of course! My first stop was Dresssew for pillow forms and fabric.

But upon closer inspection I (ok, the hubs and I) decided that my original choices were a wee-bit to “citrusy” (my words) or “baby-y” (his words). Luckily, I bought most of the fabric from the discount bins, so we were only out about $11 when we decided not to proceed with lemon yellow and lime green.

All’s well that ends well, however, because this fabric failure sent me on a mission for better fabric finding, which let me to SewFineFabric’s awesome Etsy shop. If you need fabric, go there now. I found amazing fabrics for awesome prices, delivered straight to my door. After a few hours browsing, I crossed my fingers and checked out with the following pretty fabrics in my cart.

It took about a week for them to arrive, and it took only a few hours of cutting and pinning and sewing and stuffing. I have to say: they turned out perfectly (and yes, I still need to hand stitch the bottom corners and even out the stuffing in the cylindrical pillows)!

But something was still missing. The room still looked a bit empty.

And then I found them.

[I need you to close your eyes and imagine a screenshot of a craigslist ad for “2 sweet wingbacks, contemporary fixer-uppers! – $150 (Kits)” complete with a picture of THE TWO ARMCHAIRS I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR. In my excitement I, unfortunately, failed to take a screenshot.]

Well, fixer uppers they may be, but beauts they are as well.

I emailed the seller last Wednesday telling her I was out of town and asking her if I could get them for $100 for the pair if they hadn’t been bought by Monday. She said sure, so I followed up Monday, and imagine my surprised and delight when they were still available!

Even scuzzy as is they make the living room look amazing.

And just imagine how good the room will look when they aren’t falling apart and are a dark charcoal grey. And we put up our art. And our bookshelves. And once we’ve painted!

The colour on the right is the winner. The colour on the left will be a feature wall. And the elephant is just for white reference. We’re enlisting my in-laws to help paint when they come in August for a week. In the meantime, I’ll just hug my globe.

So, on that note: Happy Thursday peeps! I’m taking tomorrow off this blog (for 1 more day of recovery) and I promise I’ll be a better blogger next week!