PUT A BIRD ON IT

Portlandia is great - watch it. Another great original is Envelop.eu! We have this very boring, very utilitarian espresso brown couch that I bought sight unseen, online purely because it was made from Crypton fabric and seemingly waterproof. The cats that "ran away" (as we tell our daughter, but really they're in great homes) were really into pissing all over my sofa and I was hoping this new couch would not get nasty. The last couch was very soft, smelled very gross and according to my husband, "was the best couch he ever had" (I bought it before we lived together so I take offense that he thinks he "had" that couch even if it was nasty). I guess after marriage my stuff becomes his stuff and vice versa. Sweet! Now I have a huge record collection. Back to the real story - the brown sofa is pretty boring and I just went back to the Crypton site after years away and it looks like they currently also carry only one sofa option, but it's pretty cool and much cheaper than the one that I bought. Dang! They also making a pretty nice modern nursery glider.

I put a bird on it.

When we moved to our current home we toyed with getting a new sofa that was a bit more stylish, but decided to just spruce it up with some throw pillows and save money for big stuff, like renovating our kitchen. After a lot of online and in-person shopping and seeing only boring or ridiculously expensive pillows that would totally break us I happened upon Envelop. It's a Belgium based site that allows designers to upload their designs which are then printed onto various housewares like aprons, pillow covers, placemats, and the like and the designers make some money and you can end up with a very original design for something that tends to be really boring. For the pillow cases, the USD/Euro exchange rate was almost one to one a couple of years ago so I got them for about $20 each and bought the pillow inserts at Michael's Arts and Crafts for about $6. I got six of them and I love looking at them. Other than our original art in the house, they're one of my favorite buys.