Living Room Update | 1

Hello again, friends. It’s been a while (again) since I posted, and to tell you the truth I had to scramble to finish this post to get it out on August 31st and avoid having a calendar month that contained zero posts. But as the saying goes, something is better than nothing, and the something that I have for you today is, in fact, pretty good! I left you last time with an update on the dining room, since we had just (at the time) done a switcheroo with our living/dining room spaces. I promised you then an update on the new (at the time) living room space, and I finally have that for you today!

Let’s start from the very top with this space. Here’s what it looked like when we moved in in February.

Next, we have the dining room phase. This was part one of the dining room phase, when we still had our round table. There was a part two of this phase in which we had our current table in this space, but let’s just skip that, mmmkay? The dining room phase in all its parts was clearly a misguided phase.

And finally the current much-improved living room space!

         

Tons better, right? I realized I never even posted a picture of the living room furniture in the other space, and that’s because it never really worked in that space enough for me to want to show it to you. Even though this space is smaller, it’s much better suited for furniture to be grouped for conversation, and of course it will be nice to use our fireplace in our actual living room during the winter.

One of the reasons we initially didn’t want to use this space for the living room was that we didn’t want the TV over the fireplace. It wasn’t even so much for design reasons that we wanted to avoid this as for a host of other logistical inconveniences, including: uneven mantle, need to potentially drill into brick, lack of ready electrical source, presence of ready heat source in close proximity several months out of the year. The solution we came up with was to house the TV on a bookcase on an adjacent wall.

I like to think this maintains the fireplace as the focal point of the room. The TV is still a little bit of an eyesore, but I hope as I get around to hanging things on the wall it will become less attention-getting. Ps, the TV console is an Ikea Billy bookcase to which we added the nifty Morliden glass doors. I love how much more custom the doors make the piece look. Right now I have them lined with fabric, but I could see doing marble paper, or a cool printed gift wrap or wall paper.

All in all, the living room is in pretty good shape, but there are still a couple projects left from the master list:

• Refinish floors
• Paint
• Replace trim
• New light fixture

Justin has been working on installing the trim (which I can’t wait to show you), but it’s definitely still going to take some time before it’s all in. We also have to add that list to replace the weights inside the windows that allow them to be raised/lowered. They were removed at some point in time and for who knows what unimaginable reason, but Justin is going to repair them when he removes the window trim. Thank goodness he is so handy because I already broke one storm window all by myself–I’d be living with Saran Wrap over all the windows in no time.

I do plan to be back with more regular updates and content as we move into fall and (say it ain’t so) winter, so hopefully there won’t be any more long periods of radio silence on my end. Hope you’ve all had a lovely summer! I bought a water color set and have been painting as gleefully as (and definitely no more skillfully than) a five year old. What have you been up to lately?