It's Sunday afternoon and all the stores are open from noon until 6. We headed over to northwest Atlanta, off Howell Mill Road, on Huff road. It's a former warehouse and manufacturing district now filled with furniture stores. I guess every town has at least one of these districts. Atlanta has several. Unless you shop with someone in the know, you'd never find these places. Once you are there, there are more places than you could visit in a week of shopping. Almost every one is huge.
But before we left we did another kitchen experiment. Compared to what we are doing in the big room the kitchen is really boring. Gordon says we need something to bring colors from the big room into the kitchen. That's an over simplification of what he said. But it's something the eye knows instinctively I guess.
He found some blue masking tape and did this:
Imagine painting the blue part a color from our fabric and screen.
Not strong like the tape, much more subtle.
That's pretty good.
Now imagine the panel inside the tape doing some else.
I can't imagine exactly what but I can imagine something.
Then we headed for "Source Rug & Home" at 1088 Huff Road. Amir Fazlahi was our sales person. It was huge and coveniently having a going out of business sale; but don't the all. Amir was about as good a salesman as I could imagine. He and two helpers moved mountains of carpet for us to look at.
Gordon eyeballed for fit and match; JoAnn and I for like or dislike. When we found a good one, we checked the price, and threw our fabrics on it. If it was a candidate, Amir marked it with a fold and we charged on. Then Amir and helpers moved our candidates to the big floor and we began serious scrutiny.
The issues are:
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Cost
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Looks
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Match
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Do we spend bigger in the big room and cheaper in the kitchen?
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In any case we looked for the 8x10 great room rug first.
Here are a few we pulled out. None of the pictures do them justice. For me, the first one I like stays in my head. It destroys my objectivity for the rest. Maybe it's that way for everyone.
This is the one we bought.
We found three Orientals.
The were great but they were expensive, and well, oriental.
We started throwing swatches on our number 1 pick.
I'm not sure you can tell but the rug picked up the colors in all the fabrics.
We think the floral with the black background worked slightly
better than the one with the brown background. It's a close call.
Here is a kitchen rug possibility.
Another kitchen rug - something completely different.
We bought our first pick and left the kitchen rug for another time.
In the house. It makes the white sectional pop.
It doesn't match the sectional though.
It brings in everything else in the room. Remarkable.
All of the squares are 3-D textured.
We bought the carpet and were hyperventilating so we headed out to look for barstools. We headed for two stores on Ellsworth Industrial Blvd. We're looking for stools that don't look like our dining room chairs in style or color. We'll probably paint the stool. We found stools galore but didn't buy. Then we headed for MANORism, just up the street. It was an unassuming place, from the door we entered a huge nearly empty room containing a bunch of barstools.
One was the very one; and cost on $54. But there was only one of them. Another looked great too but it was about $150. We found Kelly Hodges, the store manager, and presented her with our problem. She said there were some others slightly damaged she'd let us have for $54 each. She sent her helper to look. In the meantime we discovered that the store was about as big as a football field and they had everything.
Short answer, we bought three. I now I said we'd only get two. But one will go on the kitchen side for me to sit in. After we paint the ceiling, we'll paint the chairs.
You can't see it, but the bottom of the chair back has a line of holes.
Looks great.
Pardon the focus, here are the holes.
At MANORism we meet our first fountain. JoAnn and I are speechless.
It's about 5 feet tall and sounds like Niagra Falls.
I'm interested but not quite feeling it yet.
