life and puppies

I’ve come to realize that when you’ve purchased a house that has been flipped and the flipper is not someone you’ve seen on HGTV, you may be looking at a lot of unexpected work down the road. Particularly if you made your offer in, say, January when Wisconsin does not allow transparency of a lot of parts of a house that are important. Like, for just one example, the roof.

Anyway, one thing that I knew we were going to want to change was all of the window treatments. I knew it would be expensive, but I also knew (a) it’s not exactly like you ever buy a house because of the window treatments so needing to swap them is super common and (b) it wasn’t a change we needed to make immediately. Or so I thought. Having lived here now for three months, the cheapness of the craptastic blinds is driving me bonkers. Still, we simply don’t have the money to do anything about it right now. So, I wait.

On the other hand, I really couldn’t stand what had happened to Bear’s blinds for much longer.

Ew

So, I ordered a roman blackout shade from Pottery Barn Kids on Thursday and it was at our door when we came home on Friday. I was a little freaked out by the speed of the delivery, and the lack of a packing slip, but not enough to let it stop me from asking AO to sub out the abandoned house-style blind for a creamy new white one with an aqua blue stripe. And this morning, we got this:

Ta da! (Sorta)

I’m mostly happy with the wrinkly new shade, but there’s something a little odd about it. While it doesn’t fit perfectly, and allows for some light on the sides, that doesn’t really bother me because that sort of imperfection feels rather inevitable when not ordering a custom product. What’s weird to me is the little pinpricks in the fabric that seem to be spelling out some sort of constellation code. Pottery Barn doesn’t appear to allow reviews on their site – something I never noticed before – and it’s not enough of a bother to put in a call to customer service, but it’s a little surprising and irksome.

In all, I feel it’s been a rather satisfying morning.

A much nicer view