We are wrapping up furnishing and styling FIVE rooms in our home. And I’ve been doing it all at once!
If this sounds hectic and chaotic to do this all at once, it kind of was. But we’ve lived in this house for two years and have purchased a very limited amount of new furniture. When we moved in, we worked with the furniture we had while prioritizing what the house needed. The first year we were in the house was all the necessary but boring things. Like electrical work, updating some plumbing, seismically fitting our home, landscaping, etc. We did do some fun things like a new kitchen faucet and screen door. But overall we did not buy a lot of new furniture for the home. Everything we had was fine.
Prepping Before Buying
I’m not versed in photoshop at all. I knew it would be tremendously helpful to figure out what was going to look good together if I could somehow get all the things in my cart and put them on some sort of digital page or collage to see if it looked good. I already had a Canva account, so I decided to use that. Above are all the screenshots of how I used it to figure out what worked for our bedroom. I did this with our entry table and another console table (seen here) and it was so helpful. Of course the dimensions were not accurate which was fine, I just needed to make sure it wasn’t going to look totally bonkers.
Working with Canva definitely helped. But there were still some misses. When our dresser arrived it was way darker than what was shown online. Then our armoire showed up and it was black. Our nightstands I had bought back in February that were currently on backorder were also black. I couldn’t cancel the order for the nightstands fast enough because it was going to be waaay too much black.
Living Life Before Buying
Over the course of six years, we moved five times. I found that it takes a little while to learn how you really live in a space. About a year into each home, I’d find myself rearranging to make spaces flow better for us and how we lived. Examples of this would be moving kids bookshelves from their bedroom to their playroom, putting a mirror in a corner instead of artwork, and most recently swapping out a bench for a table in our entry way in our current house. It takes time to learn how you live in a house, and I’m glad we didn’t immediately buy everything in the first few months of living here.
Selling Old Furniture
I try to sell as much as I can on Marketplace or NextDoor. Our furniture is in pretty good shape and we live in a decent size city where there is a big enough pool of people shopping on these apps. I was able to sell our old dining room table and chairs, credenza, dresser, desk and chair, a mirror, and console table. This is also awesome because typically when I’m restyling a room, everything will arrive and I’ll realize oh no! I need art over a dresser, or could use a lamp on a nightstands, or another vase on a table! This extra spending money from selling our old things allows me to fill in the gaps of styling for things I didn’t necessarily budget for.
Photo above is after we sold our dining room table. It sold way faster than I anticipated, and we ended up eating off of an old folding table for a week. Not ideal, but at least it sold!
Painting!
Obviously paint before all your new furniture arrives. Since we don’t have grandparents or any family around to watch kiddos, we knocked this paint job out within 24 hours. We even painted the ceiling! Of course we could have had one of our beloved babysitters over to watch our children, but instead we opted to just pull a reallllllyyyyyy late Friday night and then wrapped it up by 4pm on Saturday (while tag-teaming watching our kids). I was so proud of us. And now I want to paint so many more rooms in our house now that I know we can do this – hah! The paint color we chose for our bedroom was Swiss Coffee.
