If you have "adult" furniture...

jappicel

Did you wait until the kids were older to purchase it?If not, How did you make it through the kids being small? Slip covers? Microfiber? A particular color or fabric?We have a small house and live in the city. All of our friends seem to have 'nice' furniture and I just can't get over the hump. I always tend to be practical thinking the rug and couch are going to get ruined. Just last week my daughter spilled an 8oz pediasure on the couch!Help, I'd really like to upgrade for more style! 

CD+AL

We do a few things.  Our furniture definitely isn't perfect, but I don't let it get torn up and look like "kid furniture" either.  Prevention is 1/2 the battle or more.

1) We bought leather couches, which cleans up easier if there is a mess. 

2) We don't wear shoes in our house, so it reduces the amount of dirt that gets tracked into the house in the first place.  It also means that we don't have to fight the, "Get your shoes off the couch!" battle.  This makes a huge difference.  A good friend of mine lives basically next door, and our kids play together.  Her cleaning schedule is similar to mine, but they have dogs and kids with shoes running through the house all the time.  There is a HUGE difference in the way that her house, furniture and rugs look, and it's a lot more work for her to keep up with it all too.

3) On that note, when we did have indoor dogs (we don't now), they were trained to stay on hard floors only, which made it a little easier to keep up with their messes too, but they could still be with us most of the time.  This was also really helpful with our allergies b/c it kept some of the hard to clean allergens off the carpets.  You could also implement this in other ways with baby gates if you don't have hard floors or want to go that route, but it really does help.

4) No eating on the furniture.  If we do eat in front of the TV (snack or meal), we make it a picnic.  Depending on how much room we need and how messy it is, I either put out a vinyl table cloth or a beach towel to sit and eat on.  So far, a spill has never caused more than a minor mess that was easy to clean up with a quick vacuum or blot with a microfiber pad.

I might have more ideas, but this is just off the top of my head.

franciscaz

We bought all brand new stuff: dining, living, master, etc. 2 years ago.  The couches is micro-fiber so we just wipe it up every weekend.  Honestly it will look like crap eventually (we plan on updating our furniture in a few years) BUT I'm glad we did it.  I didn't want to live in a home that looks like it is for children and could be in a day care center.  I wanted to live in a home that looked like it was designed for my aesthetics.  

CareBear0607

We have dark leather furniture, no shoes in the house, eating only at the kitchen table.  The only time DD is can eat on the couch is if she is sick (let her lounge and watch tv).  In that case I make what we call a "couch bed' and I put a blanket on the couch, which she lays on, her pillows from her bed for her head, and a blanket on top of her.  She can have a snack and something to drink then and if anything were to spill it would be on the blanket.

KathrynMD

We have a dark brown sofa and the carpet is a multicolored and ridiculously stain resistant.  I spilled nailpolish remover on the carpet and just blotted it up and rinsed it w/ water and there's not a single mark.  The sofa pretty much wipes clean.  This is our aesthetic anyway, but it helps that its pretty kid-proof.

anna7602

We don't have rugs, just very nice finished hard-wood floors. They actually make everything else in the room look quite "grown up" and sophisticated. I would say they are the nicest thing we own.

We also have very nice book cases, with glass cabinets that DD still hasn't figured out how to open at age 3. So, there was no chance of her climbing them or flinging books off the shelves when she was younger.

Our couch isn't particularly nice (it was DH's first purchase out of college), but it's black and on top of the hardwood floors and next to the upscale bookcases, the living room looks pretty well put-together.