Perfection Realized. Just Once.

As I've discussed in painful detail, we've renovated our living room to reveal the history and charm original to our house.  Throughout the house, we want to bring out the antique colonial elements without creating a dark, dingy shrine to ALL things colonial.  It's a fine line we walk.  Keeps us up nights.  

Okay, not really.

But I do have to be careful when I'm choosing each element.  Turning the antique ladder into a blanket rack was the right move.  But if I tried to also display the antique ironing board, golf club, and garden rake, well then we'd have a shrine on our hands.  I'm holding out hope that as we continue renovations our other rooms will provide perfect nooks for those amazing finds. (B.daddy found them on the property.)

Another challenge is how long it takes us to settle on the right elements and then get them in place.  I have concluded that we like to take our time, so we can be sure of what we want.  We aren't obsessive or materialistic. On the contrary, we are very picky about what we put in our home so that we won't freak out on our kids or friends if they put their feet on the couch, walk in with muddy boots, jump on our bed, put a drink on the end table, etc.  But--and I say this with all humility and frankness--we do have excellent taste.  I.e. expensive.  On one thing we always agree: beautiful, well-made stuff.  So we have to walk a long road to find beautiful things worthy of our senses that don't cost an arm and a leg.  I am happy to announce we are now one element closer to Living Room Completion!

I found the perfect rug!!

I wanted a braided rug, since they were among the first cloth floor coverings available to common colonial folk.  But I did not want one in the currently traditional braided rug family.  I wanted the basic structure of the resourceful floor covering, but with a creative spin that would reflect our tastes.
And I must take a home-maker's moment to point out that I wanted a rug because we painted our floor a solid, pale green.  So I need to put a rug over the part of the floor that would require I mop more often than I want to.

We had picked out the perfect rug online, but were waiting for the right moment to purchase it.  When the moment arose, the product was "No Longer Available."  Imagine my dismay.  Oy vey!  My life was over!

So I left it alone for a while.

As is my style, I woke up this morning and decided I was going to find our rug!  Today!

What do you know, but I walked into our favorite overstock warehouse and nearly tripped over a bin full of this delight:

I immediately started untying and unrolling!  I couldn't believe my eyes.  Here were rolls and rolls of stupid-cheap, funkily designed braided rugs--in the perfect size for our little room.  I'm surprised I didn't hold a hallelujah session right then and there.  In my heart.  I was having it in my heart.

After all of ten minutes I unrolled the p-e-r-f-e-c-t rug.  It's so perfect, I didn't even know how perfect it was until I got it home.  LOOK at this:

The colors are bright, but also married to some subdued tones.  It is a square so there's a good portion protected beneath the couch in case any of our children barf roof tar on the exposed corners.  And there just happens to be a repeated strip of green that matches our floor color, well, perfectly without turning our efforts into a Contemporary Sage Disaster.

If you can manage to look past the adorable puppy, you can get the whole effect.  It's bright, but not girly.  Braided, but not boring.  And the dog is really, really cute.

Do you see that little strip of red and white ticking?  Well, let me tell ya...our roman shades (that I still haven't made) will be black and white ticking.  There are only three strips of this ticking on the rug, which is juuuuust right.  And there's even one, precious strip of pink just for me!  Can you tell I really like this rug?

And Reason No. 1 that I like it?  

My kids can make a mess on it, and you'll never know.  Except for roof tar.  I've tackled nearly everything but roof tar.

~~~

Here are a few other details we've nailed down, so to speak.  We already had the goods, but had some arrangement challenges:

These are photos I took in the city back when I could carry a camera into the city--you know, before diaper bags.  We had to figure out how to hang them considering the lamp and the obnoxious thermostat.

I found these charming prints in a little antique shop in Little Rock over ten years ago.  They were displayed just like this in the shop, and this is the first time I've had a nook to mimic it.

I got this print from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.  Maybe you recognize it from the blog's background?  I like the idea of having art our home that the kids can actually go see in person.  It makes it all so much more relevant.  We were just at the MFA last Friday, and Colette saw the original painting and said, "Hey! There's our painting!"  Which I love.