It’s only in the past year or so I have become interested in decorating our home beyond the “it’s cheap/free and/or will be easy to clean” criteria.

For example, the sofa and chair we have now we bought not long after we bought the house because the hand-me-down sofa we were using was just about on it’s last leg (well literally on it’s last 3 since we accidently broke one of them off). We bought the first ones that met our needs: 1) inexpensive 2) comfortable 3) it’s appearance didn’t make either one of us want to gag. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the purchase at all and we still love both pieces, but there are a couple of things that I would change if given the proverbial time machine. To start, the arms are too bulky, with a space as limited as ours, they are just taking up valuable real estate. The back cushions are kind of a pain in the ass, we usually end up just throwing them on the floor. It’s not exactly the most durable construction, I don’t see it lasting us another 5 years, at least not without worrying about injury.

I don’t know exactly where I am going with this really, other than to say I have been giving the overall aesthetic of our home a lot of thought recently and have been trying to get a good idea of what “our style” is. We both like clean lines, nothing too ornate or overstuffed. I tend to lean more towards a Danish modern,  midcentury vintage feel that The Husband thinks is a bit “too Brady Bunch”. I think we are getting there though.

I am seriously loving this home tour over at desire to inspire.

The next week or so I should be starting the relatively large project of our living room. After some water damage (reeeeally long painful story that I am trying desperately to block out) to the ceiling, we have decided to scrape off all the acoustic ceiling and (hopefully) be able to do minimal patching and sanding and end up with a smooth ceiling. I will also be sanding, priming and painting all the walls and trim at the same time and installing a new ceiling fan. So that should be fun. I will try to get as many before, during and after pictures to share as possible.

Oh and next weekend is my 28th birthday! And I am getting my well-passed-the-shoulder-length hair chopped off next Tuesday. September is shaping up to be quite a month. Stay tuned.

Ah, Gustav, we’re still here.

In the end, Gustav ended up not being quite as destructive as it was originally predicted, at least in our area. Other than some debris and continuing rain, we are no worse off than before. After preparing for the worse, we ended up only being without power for maybe an hour or so and that was after we had gone to bed.

From what I hear, however, there is quite a bit of damage done to our south, around Lafayette and Houma. Of course all you hear about is how easy New Orleans got off this time, you know as easy as a city that is below sea level in the flood plain of one of the largest rivers in the world that also happens to be in a hurricane zone can be expected to get off.

That being said, it’s not quite over for us yet. We still have about another month of the peak season and several more storms brewing in the Atlantic, so far Hanna, Ike, and Josephine. While none of them are particularly pressing for the Gulf just yet, if anything Gustav has reminded us that the only thing predictable about our weather down here is its unpredictability.