Around the House: New Chair and Touch Ups

I know I haven't posted about the house lately, but I wanted to let you know about the few improvements that we made to our house and/or its decor. First on the list, we got a new chair and ottoman for our living room! Our poor recliner had been licked to death by Louie.  The final straw came one weekend when Louie licked the recliner into an oblivion, resulting in him puking all over it. I know that might be TMI, but at that moment we knew we needed to get rid of it...

Justin and I dragged our recliner on the front porch as a final "nail in the coffin" that it was ready to be sent out to pasture. While I was at work, I put up a craigslist post, advertising a "free recliner needing cleaning" (no picture attached either!).  By the time we got off work, someone had picked up the recliner off our porch! Also, Justin was able to find the recliner's replacement on Craigslist! Isn't it neat how things come full circle?  You get rid of something, via Craigslist, and you find an even better replacement from...you guessed it, Craigslist :)

We were able to get the Crate & Barrel Cameron Chair and ottoman, in a beige microfiber material for less than 25% of the full price! I swear, Justin has the uncanny knack of finding some pretty good stuff on CL! ;) 

In addition to buying a new chair and ottman, we figured it was high time for us to touch up some of the paint around the house. As the house expands and contracts with the changing seasons, along with the natural settling of our new kitchen, we have noticed some fine cracks that have appeared in our dry wall. Nothing earth shattering, just something that needed to be fixed for pure asthetics. Over the weekend, we broke out the spackle to fill in the cracks and busted out the paint.

The trail of spackle...

In case you're wondering why Justin is wearing a mask, when sanding the spackle, the dust that is produced gets everywhere! The dust settled all the way on our kitchen countertops that were at least 20 feet away!

Now it's prime time! We learned from painting the upstairs bathroom that paint sticks better on dried spackle if you add a layer of primer first.  This is even the case when using a 2-in-1 paint/primer.

Then we finished it off with the paint. It took a couple of tries to get all the spots with the lighting that we had, but we eventually got it!

Which brings us to the finished product of a nicely painted, crackless wall you see today :)

What about you? Any recent furniture purchases? What about crack-filling or painting? Please tell me I don't have to do this every year!