To Keep or Not to Keep

Not going to lie. There is a lot of stuff hanging around my house which may or may not still have tags on it. I recently snipped the tags off 3 lamps and a trunk in my living room after probably 8 months of "deciding" whether or not to keep them. Sometimes I say this to appease Handy Hubby when I come home with a carload of "deals" from HomeGoods, Target, thrift stores, estate sales, etc. If I leave the tags on, maybe he'll think it may leave again? Sometimes he's right. Most of the time not.

I used to be a chronic returner, until I started a new policy with myself - only buy what you love. I often pick up a lot of things as I'm walking through a store. When I get to the checkout (generally it's a long line at HomeGoods on a Saturday afternoon), I reassess what I have in my cart and whether I really, REALLY want or need it. Sometimes you just need things - a new set of sheets, etc. Most of the time, you don't need stuff but if you love it, and it's a good price, it's probably worth getting. I have started doing this with clothes too. It seems to be working and I think that I've purchased less things in the past 6 months than previously.

So, here's the current example going on in my living room.

Two new chairs on either side of the console table.

Here's what it looked like previously.

Now, the kicker is that these chairs were $100 each marked down from $150 at HomeGoods. Not a super amazing deal, but a nice price for upholstered dining chairs. They are also small in scale which is pretty hard to find because upholstered dining chairs tend to be REALLY big these days and that just won't work in this space.  The dark finish also works well. I have been looking for used chairs for a while to no avail.

Does our living room really need more chairs? Kind of. We have 4 chairs in there but when we have a crowd, it's not really enough space. These chairs can also be pulled into the dining room for a dinner party.

The problem? They don't match!! If you look at the picture below, you can see that they are slightly different. the one on the  left has a rounded front and slightly curved back, and the one on the right has a square front and squared back. The finish is also slightly different - one more traditional, and one more rustic. It's not really noticeable unless you are really paying attention. I didn't even realize it until I was loading them into the car.

So, the tags are still on. I'll give it a few more days then make a call one way or the other, but I'm leaning toward keeping them. If they matched exactly I would definitely keep them but the slight mismatch kind of bugs me, but then again I don't spend tons of time in this room and it would be handy to be able to pull a comfy chair into the dining room for bigger parties.

To keep things real and give you a hint on what our "formal" living room is most often used for , here's the wider angle shot. I removed Woody and Buzz from the console table before taking my shots.

Thoughts?