If you buy my house it's going to come with a lot of furniture in the deal. These stairs are pretty cool but so hard to deal with when it comes to lifting stuff upstairs.
I spent the whole weekend clearing out the toys in the loft. Everything is gone. I have for once consolidated the toys for 4 children either in their rooms or in the "dining room", but they no longer have free reign of my loft. I'm planning on turning that into a common study area for them to use for homework, etc.
After I spent a lot of hours cleaning and rearranging we went to Furniture Row here...a compilation of furniture stores that are going out of business. I had a couple purchases on my mind if the deal was right. 4 news desks and a few bookshelves for the loft. This is a tough task because I don't want it to look like a school or an office. I still want it to be homey looking. Also, secondary on my list was an entertainment center for our master bedroom.
For years the master bedroom living area sat empty. Then Q was born and I transformed it into a nursery for his first year of life. Then he got bigger and needed his own space so he moved. after he moved into his own room I moved some stuff out of storage (a futon that was bright blue...I recovered it and put it in the TV area with a table and lamp). Then we bought a Wii and the kids were breaking the Wii while it was downstairs with the main TV, so we moved it upstairs and got our old TV and TV stand out of storage and put that in the area. Now, we had a hodge podge TV area that didn't match the rest of the master bedroom.
A month ago, I decided I was sick of waking up at 4:30 every morning with the sun shining in my face. I found black out drapes that matched the room. Drapes hung!
While hanging the drapes I noticed that the Wii was being destroyed again. The kids were getting into the stuff because it was all out in the open. Q was opening games and scratching disk etc. I mentioned that we would need an entertainment center to house this stuff soon.
Now...please keep in mind that I am anti-electronics in the bedrooms. It was a big thing for me to even move this stuff into my room. I only did it for the safety of the equipment. And, now I was seriously considering a piece of furniture meant to house this thing.
So, while we were desk shopping today...I walked into a store going out of business. There was a perfect sized unit on the floor that i thought would look nice. It was 3 pieces (I only wanted the center piece). The 3 pieces all had separate tags totalling $4200. There was a separate tag on the center piece that said $1050. The sales guy said, make me an offer. I walked around, left, came back, sent Rami in, talked about it and then we decided to make an offer. $750 for a unit that retails for $4200. SOLD!
Now, delivery is always a problem for me. #1, I hate paying an arm and a leg and waiting 4 days. And, #2 then dealing with the delivery people not being on time after I sat home all day (which is always hard with 4 kids and a hectic schedule). I've never had luck with delivery of anything except pizza since we moved to this house.
We decided to call our friend Mike with 30 minutes left before the store closed. He came over and it took 6 guys to load the 3 pieces of furniture into Mike's truck and our minivan.
2 hours later Mike, Rami and I (I only helped a little) got the unit up the stairs. For a full hour the unit was stuck teetering on half a step, halfway up the stairs and we were sweating, trying to decide do we take it up or bring it back down? We tried one last thing. First we had to unwedge the unit from the holes it had made in the walls going up. We actually had to make the holes bigger so we got give it the extra 6 inches on either side that we needed for leverage.
Then by sheer force Mike and Rami heaved it up the stairs. I was behind them giving encouragement and praying that the whole thing didn't topple right over the top of the banister and shatter to a thousand pieces on the tile floor below.
They did it! It looks great and I'm thankful for friends like Mike (and his wife Trisha who lent Mike to us for 2 hours).
After we got it set up I told Rami this is the one time that I don't ever want to move this piece of furniture again. I still have to go desk shopping though.....
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