New Life for the Living Room

Last time I chronicled my shopping trip for new lamps and mirrors for the living room. Safe at home with four mirrors, two lamps, and no missing children or broken items, I set out to give new life to the living room. You can read here all about how we recently added new paint to the whole upstairs. With a calmer, cleaner palette for our home, I was ready to make some changes to our family's favorite crash zone, the living room.

Last time you saw the living room, it looked like this.

I tell people all the time that having a corner fireplace is as much of a curse as it is a blessing. A blessing because it's tucked away in a cozy corner; a curse because arranging a room around it is a big fat pain in the you know what. We've had our couch and chairs in every imaginable spot in the living room and nothing ever has seemed quite right. The fireplace isn't the only one to blame, however. Dave and I purchased the huge couch and matching monster snuggler chairs before we even moved into the house {oops!}, and all that oversized comfiness makes it difficult to fit everything into a room without the room appearing cramped. One of us had the brilliant idea to move one green snuggler downstairs in order to make more space in the living room. Less seating for guests? Yes, but that was a tradeoff for a better look for this part our home. We moved the couch to the wall that joins the stairway to the fireplace and put a green snuggler chair perpendicular to the couch and opposite our piano. Breathing room! Plenty of room to walk!

I moved a pair of tall end tables on either side of the couch {the perfect spot for those pretty new lamps} and brought an old steamer trunk that we had sitting in our downstairs living room upstairs to sit next to the green snuggler chair. The steamer trunk has been in my family since my ancestors made the voyage from Norway to America {pretty cool!}, and I was happy to have it in a place where I could enjoy it more. Previously it sat downstairs in our family room as a side table for a lamp; now it's one of the first things I see when I walk through the front door. One more switcheroo for the living room - we had a huge coffee table upstairs {What was it with us and huge furniture??}, and it monopolized too much space entirely. We had a smaller coffee table sitting in our storage shed and decided to let it take center stage in the living room.

Dave and I were really starting to like our living room as its new form was taking shape. "Why didn't we do this a long time ago?" I asked. You know the answer: because it's way too easy to put something somewhere and leave it sit forever instead of reassess once in awhile. "Is this right for our home? Do I love this here?" You know the drill; it takes effort and a lot of careful thought to love where you live.

We finally had a really great arrangement for our living room space, and we were thisclose to really, really loving it. First, we had to try out our Home Goods lamps and the new mirrors and tackle a few more obstacles in the room. And we weren't finished yet. A couple more trips to Home Goods were in store, along with a project involving power tools. Stay tuned!