Sunday, May 06, 2012

Shopping

Iain has a flower fetish. More on that later. Let's just say that you can't go to Millcreek Gardens with him unless you're willing to buy 6 or 8 little flower plants. Last time it was pansies (6 six-packs! Purple preferred). This time (yesterday) it was verbena:


He bought every color you see above, plus 3 more. "He bought" means he picked out, of course. And I may have egged him on ("Don't you like this purple and white striped one?" "Can't go home without something yellow!"). They'll trail (ie, grow in a dripping, drooping way), so I planted them in the corners of the vegetable beds. Hopefully the result will be a pretty contrast between the beds (painted orange, blue, green, and purple) and the flowers.


And then! First, you need to know that we've been using $20 IKEA stools for almost ten years. Seriously. We needed a quickie stool for a house in California, and in our moves since then (to Maine, to Kentucky, to Utah) we just...kept them.

But they've gotten seriously creaky. As in, "Am I going to fall and break my butt?" This year we finally decided to replace the IKEA stools with something more stable, sturdier, less improvised. We looked at a variety of options, but we like the unintentionally modernist style of old industrial furniture. We bought the stool you see above (times three).

It should arrive next week. By then, of course, Iain and I will have purchased ten or twenty more flowers.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Those are the same style of stool Will and I looked at for the kitchen. We went to Restoration Hardware to try them out. Not good. They rocked side-to-side a bit too much and it felt like the whole seat was going to rock off. I hope that you don't have the same issue! They are fabulous looking, though, and we were quite sad that they weren't going to work.

Fiona said...

We looked at those, as well. And we had the exact same problem. They are not built well. Also, the sales people were useless ("how do these arrive?" Dunno. "Do we assemble them?" Dunno..."Is this squeakiness and movement normal?" Dunno!)

These stools are from a company in Portland, Oregon, that builds everything themselves. The stools came and are steady as a rock.

So it's all about the vendor, I think.