If you’ve ever had a piece of furniture you found so ugly you could not bear looking at any longer but felt you couldn’t throw it away either, a family heirloom perhaps, then this post might interest you. When we first moved to our current apartment, we had a plan. We thought we’ll be staying in Amherst short-term, a year or two at most so things were purchased with a tight budget in mind. We were also saving up to buy a house somewhere where my husband’s job would take us next so we made quite a few shortcuts when it came to decorating. I designed a cozy furniture plan that would fit our lifestyle and filled the missing pieces with (very, very low) budget finds. A brand new IKEA Ektorp sofa was comfortable and pretty enough, and oh, so affordable. A few discards from friends, a couple of lucky antiques shops and local Craigslist finds and we were done. Never mind the overall flea-market feel and the fact that nothing was perfect or what we really wanted. We were willing to live with it if it was short term. And because we love to entertain weekly, one of the first things we bought for our apartment was a pair of armchairs from Wayfair. The chairs are VERY comfortable and light, easy to move around when we have people over. The brown upholstery hides all sins and is soft to touch but is also, very, very ugly! A brownish-reddish-synthetic-velvet lookalike that has been a challenge to decorate with. I initially chose the chairs mainly because of their pleasing shape, it has some appeal and I knew that with a few tweaks and a nice slipcover they could look decent, even pretty. They were also a STEAL and had good reviews so I pounced.
