Musical Furniture Part I: Dining Room Additions

***Psssst...We're honeymooning this week, but I scheduled posts to keep my loyal readers (Hi Megan! Hi Mom!) happy. I won't be online much, so I'll be responding to any questions or comments once we get back! And I'll share details of our trip later, of course!***

The time is finally here! Today I'm sharing some of the new furniture finds we purchased during my parents' visit back in April, and the rearranging we did to fit them in our place.

Okay, yeah. I said some. As if I haven't already teased this reveal long enough. But seriously, guys, this influx of furniture caused ripples all around the apartment, which means there's so much to share. I had to split the posts in two--otherwise this post would be much too long, and you'd tire of my writing, and your brain would be overloaded by the pictures!

So part I of what I like to call Musical Furniture deals with our dining room and office. And the whole game started because of this cute little yellow drop leaf that my mother spotted at Echo Echo: Home Furnishings Worth Repeating, one of my favorite consignment shops in Missoula!

{via}

Now, we'd already purchased our lime green dining room table from Echo Echo almost two years ago, and my mom was very correct in guessing that I'd love this lovely little yellow lady. We checked her out--sturdy legs, no faults in the paint job, working leafs--and deemed her wonderful. We told the owner of Echo Echo, Jennifer, that I claimed the table, then continued looking around.

While my mom browsed other parts of the store, I spied one lovely dark wooden bar stool for $35. I sat in it, wriggled around, and it passed my test. But since there was only one, I decided to pass.

Except that darn bar stool kept calling to me. So I showed it to my dad. He also admired its beauty and quality. I began pacing the room, lamenting the fact that it was one matchless bar stool, when the clouds parted (well, not really, because we were indoors) and my head-choir sang--I saw its mate!!! Obviously I brought them home (seeing as this picture was clearly taken in my apartment).

At $70 total, these babies were way less expensive (and more my style) than this comparable piece from Amazon--two of those would be three times my bars stools' price! Gotta love saving money.

Thus I came home from Echo Echo with three larger pieces of furniture (along with a few other finds I shared before). The bar stools were easy enough to find a home for--under our little breakfast bar on the back of our island!

They tuck in quite nicely there--we only had to scoot the dining room table a smidge to accommodate them.

So. The bar stools were easy to place. Miss Mellow Yellow Table was another case. We didn't have room in our existing dining room due to our sofa table turned sideboard. It wouldn't really fit with our living room decor, nor did we need a table there. In fact, the only place we needed a table was in our office. As I shared in this post, though I love the vertical storage my desk offers, I often wish I had a longer work surface. So it would make sense to add a table to our office--but not the little yellow table. It wouldn't add much work space at all to my corner.

That's when my smart mama stepped in to problem solve (just like she did with my spice rack makeover!) Why not start a little game of musical furniture and relocate our sofa table/sideboard to the back corner of our office? That way I'd gain my much-needed work space and we'd have a new home for my yellow table in the dining room!

Thus we set about doing some switcharoos. First we moved the sofa table out of the way, put the dropleaf in its place, and placed our bar tray, plus my chippy scale and a little blue bird I grabbed on clearance from Michael's, on the new addition:

And then we moved the sofa table into the office.

And it sat there for 2 weeks as we enjoyed ourselves and as I pieced back together the apartment after my parents' visit. (I kinda let the chores slide during the week they stayed with us.) I finally got around to finagling things, though. I removed everything from my desk and bookshelf, dusted them off, moved the shelf, shoved the sofa table into the back left corner, shifted my whole desk about 6 inches toward the table, moved the shelf next to the door, and finally placed everything back on my shelf and desk. 

As a reminder, here's how things used to look back when I first shared our office space:

And here's how things look now, with my new (old) table in place:

Oh, and just because I've never showed Ryan's side of the room before--it's usually kinda messy (sorry honey)--here it is!

Yes...very computer-y.

So all was right with the world. My barstools and adorable yellow table had a home.

The End.

Except...this post is all about things moving around. And of course I couldn't let things be with the yellow table. I needed to make one more switch before I was satisfied with it.

I'd already been thinking that the colors in our new map were a little too bright for our living area. And once I saw the yellow table in our dining room with the travel prints above it, I started imagining how good the map might look in their place, especially since the bright yellow of the map matches the color of the table exactly! Plus the muted yellows, greens, blues, and browns of the trio of travel prints did always look quite at home in our living room...

So I swapped out the prints and the map once more and this lovely vignette resulted:

And here's a wider shot:

And one that shows how well the bar stools really do tuck under the bar:

So that's how one innocent yellow table inspired a game of musical furniture. And the game is far from over, my friends. The living room underwent a ton of changes due to an influx of furniture, including our Prairie Sisters chair and a yet-to-be-introduced table that we purchased at another great consignment store! Stay tuned--I'm sharing our new & improved living room on Wednesday :)