Hello everybody, Daniel here!
It’s about time that I contribute something to this wonderful blog that we’ve
started. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike so that I could write as
well as Shannon has here, and this month, as we were celebrating our six month
anniversary, I was stricken.
There are many
wonderful experiences that a newlywed couple goes through during the first six
months of marriage. You learn to live with each other, and adapt to the little
living quirks that you’ve each picked up over many years of living
independently. You try to achieve the
balance of a life of both structure and spontaneity. But I think one of the more fun aspects of a
new marriage is that you’re starting to build a home.
In 99% of
marriages (ours included), the wife is the one who will be more than glad to
take charge of the way the house comes together. That’s not to say that I don’t
have any care or opinion as to what kind of furniture and décor we have,
because I’m not inclined to have zebra couches or rainbow-themed bookcases. But
my opinions are limited to what I don’t want, whereas Shannon knows very well what
she wants the house to look like, and what pieces will look best with each
other.
With the help of
our very generous family and friends, we’ve been able to acquire a great dining
room table from Urban Home, a couch from IKEA, a TV stand from IKEA, a dresser
from IKEA (sensing a theme?), a coffee table from West Elm, and a bed frame
from IKEA. The rest is pieced together from Shannon’s great vintage looking items,
and the one bookcase I had that that isn’t horrible enough to throw away yet.
However, as much
fun as we’ve had buying furniture and giving our home a specific feel, I’ve
come to realize that the furniture is not important for how it looks, but for
the memories that it creates. Our table certainly looks terrific and was a
great bargain. When I’m looking at it, though, all I can see is the friends
that we’ve had sitting there for dinner. And dog drool eventually comes out of
the couch, but it’s hard to forget the time that our buddy Moose came over to
hang out with us and nap while our friends held an impromptu jam session. Even
the tiny little wine stains that we may or may not have on our coffee table each
come with their own special stories that I definitely won’t be forgetting any
time soon.
I know that
there are a couple more items on our list that we still have left to bring in,
and I absolutely cannot wait to see the stories that will come with them.
If you have a
favorite piece of furniture and/or a story that is furniture related, please
share with us below!!!
Here is my favorite story about a piece of furniture. My parents gave me a hide-a-bed. It had a heavy wooden frame and heavy steel inner works. They must have brought it up for my first college apartment. It was a dull brown, and they had gotten it when they were first married. I covered it with many different coverings, but it was very useful for company. One time LaVonne and her then boyfriend and Doug and I went to El Torito for the dinner buffet. We ate so much that all we could do when we got home was pull out the hide-a-bed and all four of us laid down crossways on it and moaned until we could actually bend at the waist again. We moved that heavy old thing from Washington to a couple of places in Salem, and finally one day it was time for the old beast to go to Goodwill heaven. After the two men struggled and sweated to wrangle the heavy old thing into the truck, one of them remarked, "I don't know whether to thank you or not." We never saw it again, but it had served us well. Farewell, old beast!
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