Miss Celie's Pants

In my intro post for this series, I mentioned our goal was to go vintage, pre-owned whenever possible. So imagine my emotional letdown when I realized we were going to have to buy new rugs. Why? Because a 1982 open floor plan house isn’t suited in size and scale for rugs to work with our furniture and size of room. How is that?

1. We wanted square and BIG I knew our lovely hand-me-down rugs from Turkey were too small (they were too small for some rooms in our old house built in the 30s). But, I didn’t realize that the rug sizes we needed to fill the space correctly were considered ‘extra large’ or ‘mansion rugs’. LOL at ‘mansion’. This is America! What was once a mansion rug is probably a standard size for much of this country.
2. Square rugs rarely come standard in 10’x 10’or 12’x 12′. Period. I thought it would be easy, but even my searches online didn’t turn up much. My designer said at that size, we’d need to look at custom.

We needed to choose the rug first because it’s easier to match colors to a rug than match a rug to your furniture. We eventually settled on using custom rug startup Boundless. And I got over ‘needing’ a wool rug after seeing it would cost several thousand for each and STILL need to be cut down to the right size. 

Here’s our palette. I was SURE Jordan wouldn’t like it. But, he looked at it and said, “That looks great.” Honestly, that’s more progress than we made in nine months. Look, he doesn’t even think we need to paint since the walls *are* painted, that’s a story for another time.

Enter Boundless Rugs. Boundless has a set number of designs and 22 colors to chose from. I found them from much googling on custom size rugs. What’s great, is any of their nylon rugs are customizable by size and color. PERFECT.  Each rug was going to come in at our budget. As of this writing, they are going to add more designs. But, I couldn’t let FOMO stop me from moving forward with our project.

From Boundless, we ordered a FREE sample rug to see the colors and textures in real life. I actually put this on the ground, stood on it, propped my ankles on it. The pile is 1/2″ thick and far denser than I would have thought. The material is nylon which is stain resistant and durable for high traffic areas. I do wish there were more color choices, but they are also a ten- months-old start up! I’ll give them some time.

Here are our final rug choices: the Miles on the left, Hendry on the right. This is where I found the designer help extremely useful. She was able to pick two rugs that are cousins, not twins. She chose colors that worked well together too (we went through several tonal iterations before settling on this). I couldn’t even wrap my mind around getting rugs that had a print and needed to be in the same room. She showed us these two and we were sold.

Boundless was fantastic to work with. They digitally edited the rug so we could see how they would look in the dimensions we needed. They also made some tweaks to the design to fit our space and our designer’s vision. For the Miles above, they showed several iterations until it worked for us. For the Hendry below, they added an additional repeat of the design, keeping the same scale (we had the option of enlarging the print for a more bold look too).

The rugs are milled in the US and will arrive in a few months. I’ll check back in when they get here! But, so far, I think Boundless is a great option if you have odd sizes. Or need specific colors. I would of course prefer wool vs nylon, but I don’t have $8,000 for rugs, lol.

Next… Upholstery. Now that the rugs are chosen, we can actually move on to FABRICS!

Since I lived in one home the last 15 years, it hadn’t occurred to me that my furniture might not ‘work’ in a new home. Our rugs were the wrong size, we went from two living room type spaces to one, and I realized just how much of what we had came out of my parent’s house.

I never thought we’d want to work with an interior designer. I think I have a pretty good eye and decent taste. But, I found after we moved into a new place together that Jordan and I couldn’t agree on anything. In addition to not liking the same things, I learned Jordan couldn’t “see” something. I.E. I bought home two chairs to be reupholstered, and he was solely focused on how ugly the fabric was. He just could not see the lines. I realized I got totally overwhelmed by choice and was best when given parameters of what to look for or limited options. I also just really dislike trying to mix prints, patterns and colors. I don’t think it’s my forte. I like how things look when it’s all done, but I don’t’ find it interesting to put together for myself (or quite frankly with other people).

I decided to blog this process because I had NO idea what to expect and thought it might be helpful for others who are considering hiring a designer. Originally, I thought interior designers were for rich people in fancy houses. But, I asked what people on Instagram and got a lot of support for working with a designer at any budget, that I decided to go for it.

Enter our **designer. I selected our designer for a couple of reasons. I wanted to work with someone local, she had a great eye from what I saw on her IG, she had an actual working website that was extremely well written, she was very responsive to my initial email, and we got along well. Full disclosure: I went out of my way to make sure African Americans were heavily represented in the pool of people I reached out to and hopefully also lived in Baltimore City limits. I can talk more about that in another post.

First Steps:

The Designer had Jordan and I create a joint Pinterest board with rooms and details we liked. As expected, we were all over the place. He liked dark rooms I’d liken to a wooden clad games room. I liked bright colors and prints and a LOT of pink.

Before we started working with our designer, I replaced the dining room light with that modern sputnik influenced fixture. I also bought the Acacia wood table (seats up to 10) and china cabinet, but the dining chairs belonged to my parents. Rugs are 30+ years old from my parents, sectional was in our basement and belonged to Jordan’s aunt from 1976, yellow floral chairs from a second hand shop.

Our main goal is to get our living room and dining room set up. We wanted to reuse as much furniture as possible, buy vintage and recover whenever we could and keep costs under budget. We can’t afford to do EVERYTHING decorwise we want in these spaces, so we had to focus this year on what the most important things were: recovering furniture, and getting rugs that fit– with the right size and scale. Yes, we need to paint, get new dining room chairs, and do ‘something’ about our mirror heavy / dated fireplace unit. But, those things will have to wait until 2020 or even 2021.

So, I’ll stop here. Next update — picking rugs or what I call, “The one thing I knew I needed help with.”

**I’m choosing not to use our Designer’s name until after the project is completed.