Furniture defines us, or at least I thought it did. It took my husband and I, well, me, really, months to buy our first couch because I didn’t really know what style to buy. Did I want our environment to say to people, well to me, maybe, that we were homey with doilies and overstuffed couches or to be international – French Provincial, maybe, or to go with simple clean lines like Ikea.
What my furniture says to me now is that I don’t care about furniture – and that is totally fine with me. My kitchen/dining table is a beautiful pecan table (bought from friends dirt cheap) that we have put big padded swiveling office chairs around, so that we sit for long hours at table talking over good food. It doesn’t belong in a magazine picture, but it suits us and how we like to live. Our living room is full of old and cheap furniture. We don’t yell at anyone for spilling coffee or anything else in that room or any other in our house. Our pictures in the living room are of wild cats that we have picked up at flea markets, but that we like.
So, my angst in early adulthood over choosing furniture was for naught. I choose not to have the interior design matter much and what it says about me is not that I have no personality or artistic flair, but that I choose people and life over it – and that doesn’t say that I am not as together as people who have a beautiful home. Now, if I could just remember that and not beat myself up over it.
Warm, lived in, comfy homes are wonderful & inviting. Know someone with a magazine gorgeous home. Every piece is hard & uncomfortable. No one uses their living room, which looks like an upscale hotel lobby. What their decor says to me-we have tons of money & seek to impress, everything is perfect, please don't sit down & just admire our fabulous, expensive taste.
Congratulations on your warm hearth and home.
I like new comfortable furniture as some of our old stuff got to be uncomfortable.