Living Houses: reveal

This post has been a long time coming. I 100% blame the procrastination on the awful pain it is to put an 8 x 10 rug under a crazy heavy king bed, with a million supports beneath it. Hubby and I just did not feel like tackling that task. That meant the living room and guest room rugs were in place for a long time, and the rug for our master bedroom sat, rolled up, in our living room for weeks.

Thankfully, due to a fun Super Bowl party we hosted, we were forced to cross things off our to-do list...so we put on our big girl/boy pants, and maneuvered that sucker into place.

If you are new to my blog, and my rug issues, I have made it pretty clear that I have a fear of buying rugs, especially from online retailers. 1) Rugs are usually such an investment, and 2) 99.9% of rugs I want to buy are online, and therefore I can’t see or feel them before I take the plunge. Well one day I threw caution to the wind and went for it. Yup, I ordered three rugs from Rugs USA...all at one time.

I didn’t know what to expect, so I was super anxious for them to arrive. Luckily, when I unrolled each one, I was more and more pleased. They were all prettier in person than they were online, and I couldn’t be happier with my decision to place the order. {Plus it didn’t hurt that I got them extremely discounted at 65% off...which is the only way we could afford 3 of them!}

Now I know there are all sorts of "rules" when it comes to rug size and placement...but I'm pretty sure those rules are for people who can afford to follow them. And we aren't those people. :-/ That means I bought a smaller 5 x 8 rug for our living room space...because really, my main concern was having a cushy rug under foot for relaxing on the couch, or in case some young kids were over and wanted to snuggle on the floor to watch a movie or to play.

And the guest bedroom rug could probably be bigger too, but I just wanted something to give people's feet a nice place to land when they got out of bed. Plus, it can also be swapped out for the living room rug in case we wanted a pop of color out there in the spring and summer months. Like I said, we are working with a budget, people!

For our master bedroom, we had to go with an 8 x 10 rug because anything smaller would have looked ridiculous. Since we bought two smaller rugs for the other spaces, we could afford to go bigger here. I love the comfort it adds to our room.

I am so thankful our big purchase wasn't a bust! I think they add a little something to each room. And hopefully you'll be seeing more of them soon because I'm determined to pick up my house tour posts again! I might even re-do the living space because it's changed so much from my original post.

Anyone else on the cusp of purchasing a rug?? Anyone else laugh in the face of rug rules?? {Please tell me I'm not the only one!!}

Like I mentioned in my last post, I'm a little behind on revealing the progress of our patio. It's just what happens when we have a visit from my beloved parents. We end up getting involved in a million and one projects, and then I get overwhelmed with how much I need to share with you all. Of course that causes me to run and hide my head under some pillows until I get the courage to face my blogging dashboard again.

But I'm back now...and before I even get started with the little projects we just tackled, I'm going to share our UHHHHH-MAZING new patio!! The slab went through quite a few stages since you saw it here, here, here and here.

Yesterday you saw the wet concrete.

Then we had a stained, almost-cured pad...complete with hand drawn stones. {Yup, those things are manually drawn by our concrete guy.}

Then later that night, he came back to cut the joints into the concrete.

Oh, and while all of this was going on, they uncovered the fact that our gutter was draining into this...a root-busted and completely packed PVC pipe.

But that was no worry because our phenomenal patio guy had his crew create a dry well for us. I mean really, do contractors get any better than this?!?!

Sorry...back to the patio.

After the joints were cut, it was time to make a second step {we weren't happy with how just one looked, so they agreed to create another one}, and they also started to paint the crevices between the stones.