Happy Monday! How was everyone’s weekend? Mine was great—I went up to Wisp Ski Resort in western Maryland for the weekend with 18 of my coworkers. I’ll share more about our trip later this week, but it was so nice to get out of town for a weekend. This was my first trip of the year, and getting out of my typical weekend routine was a nice change. It helped me put some of my anxieties into perspective!

Today’s post is less meatier than typical, but I wanted to give you an update on my apartment decor. If you follow me on Instagram and/or remember that a few weeks ago in this post, I mentioned I had bought a new rug to delineate a dining area in the great room of my apartment.

Since I have a long history of buying furniture that’s not the appropriate scale, I measured the area around my dining room table at least five times, consulted all sorts of rug scale graphics on Pinterest, and asked a few of my interior designer friends for advice on how to select the best rug size. The good news is that I picked the perfect size rug—essentially 6×9’—but began to doubt the pattern I selected.

(Sidenote—shoes shown above are here.)

The pattern on that initial rug was beautiful, but the colors were much more bold in-person than they were online. It also introduced a lot of new colors into my apartment that weren’t already in play—yellows, oranges, different greens—and it suddenly just became very busy. The rug also didn’t play nicely with my bar stool covers, and I when I switched those to white, I liked the rug better, but I think by that point, I was past the point of learning to live with this super bold rug.

So, I sucked it up, bought a plastic rug cover, and hauled that thing down to FedEx and returned it. It was a good workout and I got 90% of my money back, so I’ll call it a win.

Knowing I still wanted a rug for that area, I went back to the drawing board. I was a little nervous because I didn’t want to have to return yet another rug. So I consulted my interior designer friends again, and came to the realization that if I went with a blue/neutral rug, it’d do a really good job of tying my apartment together since I already have a lot of blues in play—like these blue dot pillows and a blue striped statement wall.

When I saw this blue and ivory Safavieh rug, I knew I had found the one. Added bonus, it was cheaper than the first rug!

I was a little nervous when the new rug arrived—it was the moment of truth. Luckily, I love this rug in-person and it really makes my place feel like it’s one cohesive space. The blue doesn’t match the striped wallpaper exactly, but they don’t clash and I think if it was matchy-matchy, it’d be too much. I’m so glad I didn’t settle for the first rug!

I also kept the white bar stool covers instead of my palm ones, and I think that helps tie the space together a bit more, too. Fear not though—I’ve ordered two throw pillows for my couch in that palm pattern, so it will live on!

Even though I’m making a ton of design mistakes, I’m learning a lot about my own personal home decor style and am having fun sharing the process with you all here on the blog. Maybe I’ll have it figured out by the time I can afford my dream house ;]!