Shop till you drop

I spent Friday shopping with our friends from church, David and Stuart, mostly looking at furniture. I have a learner's driving permit so I can't drive unaccompanied and they had offered in the past to go shopping with me, so off we went. I found a sofa that was a likely candidate at NEXT, a big chain here. Then yesterday my husband, David, and I did some power shopping.

We started at a flooring place, where we ordered a floor for the kitchen. Then NEXT and the plan was to compare the NEXT sofa with a sofa we had liked at Laura Ashley. Then to a builder's supply place to pick pavers for the front garden, where tarmac will be replaced with grass and a gravel drive. Then to an old-fashioned full-fledged department store in Newtownards. David fell hard for a sofa there that was covered in Harris tweed. So we got that sofa and now I have to find a fabric to match to cover two chairs. I had already picked a fabric, however it doesn't match the sofa. We are on a mission to get the sofa/chair thing sorted out because we want to paint the living and dining rooms so we can get the floor put down. I originally wanted to start with the rug, but I haven't found a rug the right size that I like, so now we're trying to sort out the furniture.

Then we went to a rug place looking for a runner for the front hallway and for the stairs. We took home a candidate for the hallway (which will help us pick a stair runner, which will dictate the color we paint the stairs and the hall--so many contingencies!).

After a day of considering hundreds of options and making a few decisions, we were both exhausted.
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