t h e (c h l o e) c o n s p i r a c y: Living In The Sprawl

♫: Sprawl II - Arcade Fire x Soulwax

The Great Remodel of 2011 was put on hiatus over the winter for a few different reasons, mainly being the snowy weather, travel, the holidays, and blah-bah-blah-busy crap. But now that the weather is warming up, we have been itching to get back into it.

Well. I've been itching to get back into it. Husband just wants a functioning bathroom or two, he says. Whatever. It's hard being married to someone so high maintenance.

So! Our official remodel schedule for this year is still pretty big. We need to:

Finish two of our three bathrooms (one being our on-suite, which is getting a total gut and revamp)
Figure out what the heck to do with those ugly, unfinished stairs
Draw up some ideas for our broken main floor fireplace to make it both functional and pretty
And get some furniture and furnishings.
I mean any furniture and furnishings.
'Cuz we have none.

(I should probably explain to my newer readers, hello by the way: most of the furniture to this point in our lives had been a cast of confused, well-used characters; disjointed and displaced enough to make any empty college sorority house, or frat house, or..or...Daniel Steel novel jealous. As we installed new flooring in our entire house last year, Husband and I donated & discarded most of the old stuff as we went figuring it would be easier to dispose of it sooner rather than later! Right? So smart! Yes!) (Noooo.)

So right, furniture. Furnishings. Uhhh. I still have no idea what I want, guys. I am drawing a total blank.

But while it is very exciting sleeping on only a mattress + wheelie bed frame and digging my clothes and various valuables out of Rubbermaid Storage Containers sprinkled throughout our house, I keep losing shit because I don't know where it is. We have almost lost a few chihuahuas down the back of our bed as well, as it slowly shifts away from the wall now as there is no longer any carpet to keep it from rolling, but that is what those two fuzzy jerk-blobs get for hogging all the pillows on our glamorous pillows-turned-makeshift-headboard anyway.

(Pinterest DIY on this totally (not) coming soon.)

So to get our creativity cranking again we decided to hit the Denver Home & Garden show on Saturday to see what we could see. Which....truthfully wasn't much, as it seems we paid an $11-per-person entrance fee only to get screamed and yelled at by vendors shouting all sorts of irrational things as we walked along. Free! Win $1500! Not free! Windows! Floors! 5 Hour Energy! Pens! Free! Slap Chop! Shticky's! Furnaces! Free not free not free not free, but free, not free free free free not free not free not free but free but kinda free but not free free not free but free!

There appeared to be a lot of people there willingly enjoying the badgering however, as the place was pretty packed, and as I had never been to a home show before I will admit I found it...odd.

Hadn't these people ever heard of the comment sections on websites like Youtube? ESPN? Jezebel? Any local news station? You can imbibe in all the irrational abuse that your little masochistic heart desires at those websites, for free, and you don't even have to leave the comfort of your furniture-less, kinda broken home.

(And if you feel extra reckless and randy, you can even turn off your pop-up blocker and be the 1,000th-person-winner of a totally legit iPad, too!)

I guess my main point is this: who wants to do business with a company that feels that shouting at you (as you desperately pretend that you are a deaf-mute from Funafuti, Tuvalu, while your husband alwaaaays forgets to play along) to win something is the best way to procure your loyal patronage (and money) forever and ever?

'Cuz it isn't. I've worked customer service long enough to know all the dangerously dirty tricks: be nice, be informative, be honest, don't be pushy, and the most important, shocking thing of all: sell something I actually want to buy. It's a brilliant concept. Thanks.

So I digress. The Don-Draper-Asking-A-Very-Polite-Lady-Of-The-Night-To-Slap-Him-In-The-Face-on-Thanksgiving type of weird torture that that whole experience was (Sunday yay!) aside, we did actually find a few things of interest at the show.

Mainly a map that did nothing to tell us where the buried treasure was even though we looked really hard: