Sunday, January 28, 2018

Cleaning/Downsizing

I can hardly believe it's already the end of January. I don't know what happened to the month. I haven't really been posting because we mostly spent our energy cleaning and downsizing.

We had a friend from out of town come stay with us for a weekend so we spent the first two weeks of the month cleaning and dusting for that visit. Even when our rooms were tidy, they were so dusty that they were filthy. We spent at least a couple days wiping everything down with damp rags to remove the dust buildup. While cleaning the house was sort of unfun, we have really enjoyed having it clean the two weeks since.

We are trying to arrange our schedules so we maintain it a little better. Once upon a time, we had a bi-weekly maid, but we can't afford that anymore. So we are now trying to schedule a once-a-week cleaning (by us) of one of the floors, i.e. main floor, upstairs or basement. Our hope is by alternating each week through the different levels we manage to keep the house from getting so filthy again.

This past week we worked upstairs. Since we'd just cleaned for the visit, we were able to focus on another long-neglected activity. It only took us 8 years, but we finally hung some art in the guest room.
While we were cleaning for the visit, we decided to shuffle rugs again. This poor burgundy rug has been moved around a lot. We bought it just a couple of days after we closed on the house and it lived briefly in our living room.
After the remodel it lived briefly in the dining room until I found the nice blue one I liked.
Then it bounced briefly back into the living room.
Finally, it landed in the guest room, where it lived for the past five years or so.
Well, this month it shuffled out of use again. We decided to swap the red and blue rug from the front parlor into the guest room. I had thought to sell the blue rug, but frankly, we paid way too much money for that rug during the tech bubble and I can't bring myself to liquidate it on craigslist so we'll just use it in the guest room. Even though it's not the color scheme I would prefer, it's a really nice rug. Perhaps I'll make a quilt to match. :)
The poor burgundy rug is now listed on craigslist and perhaps we'll find a new home for it soon. I'm hoping.

If I had one thing I could have changed about our overall household decor plan, I wish I'd chosen my rugs ahead of the remodel. I wasted a lot of money and energy on rugs that seemed like bargains but didn't hold up well or were bad colors. In the long run, I believe we would have been better off if we'd bought a set of rugs off the Persian Carpet clearance page. Back in 2010 when we moved in they had a lovely thistle rug on clearance that went well with our house colors.
I regret not buying a set of those for the main floor rooms when I had the chance. We would have had the chance to select all the fabrics and paint/stain colors to coordinate with these rugs. But, alas, we did not.

Now we have a mismatched set of rugs that came along on sales. Individually, they are nice, but overall, I'm not really happy with how uncoordinated they are. This is clearly a first world problem, and we'll live without the perfect set of matched rugs, but if I had a do over, I'd have gotten the thistle rugs back in 2010. :)

3 comments:

  1. We struggle over rug selection as well. We currently have a mix of some cheap tufted (but wool) that we bought when we really needed some and some quality hand-woven wool rugs we have come across at practically giveaway bargains. I'd prefer to have all quality woven rugs, but it's not in the budget now, nor are we sure on what style we want anyway.

    If it's any consolation, most historic rugs were not used as matched sets anyway. Traditional hand woven rugs were unique anyway, and people bought them individually. So, various rugs in the same general style are perfectly normal. I think yours look good. I quite like the blue one.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I totally admit the matchy matchy problem is mine. I was just whining about something most people would consider silly. :)

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    2. Oh, I understand your sentiment. We have a large foyer and stair hall with a landing at the top. We have a large rug in the foyer,another rug at the top landing. I'm very tempted to get matching ones for those two locations, since they're part of the same space (which is otherwise painted and decorated as one unified space).

      As I say that, however, the millwork transitions from stained downstairs to painted upstairs (originally built that way, not painted over). So, even the original designers didn't intend it to be a perfectly consistent space throughout. How easy it is to obsess over minutia...

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