Mice, Cookies, Couches, and...Me?

If you've read, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie", then you might know where I'm going with this. Back in the late summer, I started thinking about trading out our plaid couch for something a bit more neutral. The desire to simplify our decor led to me asking Peter if we could take a day trip to Ikea to exchange this...

...for this lovely, neutral Ektorp couch from Ikea...

But once I had the new couch, I decided that the rug had to go (as you can see in the picture), and that my walls were too cluttered, which led to a simplification of the artwork throughout the house...



However, once the artwork was swapped out, I decided that I was tired of the Waverly red on the bottom of the walls and the front door, so I started contemplating a new color. Thinking turned into looking at paint chips with Peter, which is how we found ourselves coming home with a gallon of "Barista Brown" semi-gloss...



Although we liked the brown on the bottom and the door, the creamy top no longer looked good. That's how we wound up with paintbrushes in hand and a gallon of "Skinny Latte"...



So somehow, we went from this...



...to this...



...to this...

...to this...



...all because of a couch. Go figure.



But on the upside, those infamous rose pictures are now banished and my brother's photograph that had been languishing, unappreciated, in our bedroom, is now the highlight of the living room!



Moral of the story? If your wife asks you to go "look" at Ikea, plan on it turning into a much larger project than simply exchanging one piece of furniture for another, because if you give your wife a new couch, she's probably going to want a new paint color to go with it...

For the record, we both love how it turned out.