The Sofa Adventure of 2011

We have done a lot of updates to our home in 2011.  We bought a foreclosure in December 2010, so we had to renovate the entire place.  Luckily, it had great “bones” so we put our efforts into appliances, paint, fixtures, and tons of outside work.

We also had to get rid of a bunch of furniture.  This new house has smaller living spaces so we had to make a couple of tough decisions about selling some of our favorite pieces on Craigslist.  (One was an antique pie safe which I still wonder if I should have just stored in the garage.)

But we definitely needed a new couch for the living room.  We have an awesome sectional for our family room, but all we had was this really small Storehouse Furniture sofa (basically a loveseat) for the living room.

It’s kind of plain and boring too.  I usually like to have neutral pieces and then accent everything with color, but Hubbie and I decided to just go crazy and do something colorful and bold with the next sofa.  So we started our adventure.

First, we went to the local consignment store and bought this bad boy for $97.

Cute, right?  I love the one cushion.  I always hate to sink into the middle of the sofa when you sit on it with multiple guests. It was a classic sofa with clean lines and it definitely deserved a bright pick-me-up.   Next began our fabric search so we could reupholster it and bring it home.

That took a LONG time.  My husband documented part of it HERE.  We finally narrowed the fabric choices down to three fun patterns. Then we were told (after returning to the store with a final choice) that none of those fabrics would work on sofas.   After getting some basic fabric 101 education, we were back to square one.  But then I remembered a cute fabric I had originally seen at Jo-Ann Fabrics. It was the Waverly brand which is highly recommended.  The fabric wasn’t multi-colored, but it was bright and it definitely made a statement.

It was this Waverly Coral Cascade Petal.

We have a very neutral wall and we have moss green chairs to match, so I thought this would be fun.  But Jo-Ann did not have enough in stock and they could not find it at any other Jo-Ann location in our area.  No problem.  I went to the Internet and ordered 13 yards from the Jo-Ann website to be shipped to our house.  I was so excited that it was also on sale!  The price was in our budget, but now it was a bargain.  Awesome.

When the fabric arrived we ran it to the upholster guy who had been holding our poor sad couch in his store for almost 3 weeks.  He told us it would take 2 weeks to reupholster and then it would finally be ours! And it arrived home this afternoon!

It actually looks much brighter in these photos. But it’s definitely a dark coral, not a red.  I love it.  Annabel thinks it’s super comfy. It goes really well with the large canvas print of our kids too.  Hubbie wrote all about that awesome photo HERE.   The room is not completed.  We now need an end table to match and some additional accents, but I’ll be sure to show the finished product soon.

I’m also going to begin a series of posts about our home renovations and interior design and I’ll put them under my new category “Home Sweet Home.”  Let the adventures continue!