You might think, if you had read my post about how walking through Old Town Scottsdale sent me into sensory overdrive, that the last excursion in which I would be interested upon arriving back at home would be shopping at Lowes. You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong – however, last Saturday I was in such a state that when Jeff asked if I would come help him choose area rugs for his new room, I actually felt like Lowes would be a soothing relief after what I’d been through.
Perspective, thou art a true friend.
Really, though, it is so exciting to be able to help Jeff move in and get settled, that I enjoyed the opportunity to look at a few different things with him, including storage solutions (there’s no closet nor are there cupboards of any kind in that room). Lowes carries a lot of allen + roth products, and their closet kit and towers, customizable with shoe dividers, drawers, chrome baskets, hanging laundry hampers, and shelving of various kinds, are classy looking and offer a tremendous number of possibilities for his space. If it had been possible, I would have had my cabinet guy who did all the cabinets during our rebuild come in and do permanent installations in there to match the rest of the house, but our project budget precluded my preferences. But I digress…
After thinking through the space requirements we decided what would work for his wall storage unit, then decided it would never work for the two of us to try to lug the stuff home ourselves and settled on ordering everything on line and having it delivered, and proceeded on to the area rugs. There, we found a sort that Jeff liked very much, but on careful examination it appeared that the design on the floor model was different than the rolled up carpet on the rack, and he wasn’t sure he would like it, so we ended up going home empty handed.
However, on Sunday evening, we decided to have another go at it by visiting a different Lowes location to see if they might have what we wanted in stock. With a little assistance from the Lowes associates, we figured out that the differences in the pattern were simply due to the bigger size of the carpet. Jeff decided on two different patterns, to separate his two “rooms” (sleeping area and living-room area) and a helpful (and strong) associate got the two rugs down for us. Only then did we realize the two 8′ rolls of carpet would never fit in the mini-van. Paul was thrilled, I tell you – THRILLED to receive my call asking ever so sweetly if he would like to hook up his trailer and come to our rescue. (/sarcasm) He had already spent some time earlier in the afternoon hauling his trailer around helping another family with some moving. But rescue us he did, because he is wonderful (and he had no choice) and home we went bearing tapestries of great beauty – and more importantly, chill-banishing warmth for the tootsies of Jeff. Although the tile is very lovely in and of itself, the garage is not connected to our central air system, so it will be exclusively heated and cooled by the wall unit, and that means cold tile floors in the winter, too cold!
So although we still have several shelving and closet organizing types of units to install, the room is beginning to look rather cozy.
