Out With The Old

The living room of our house is off to the right of the foyer. It's the first room you see when you enter the house. It's also a fairly large room so we weren't actually sure how we were going to use the space. In the original blueprints, it was going to be a formal dining room. Once we got past the notion that not every house has to have a formal dining room, we decided to make it a casual living room. I'm not a keep your dining room table set for eight at all times kind of girl. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just not my style. We were already going to have a family room with a TV in it, so we knew we didn't want a TV in the living room. We just wanted a space to gather and perhaps hide out from the kids every once in a while.

After removing the wallpaper, drop ceiling, poorly designed built-ins, old oak flooring, mantel, huge wood burning stove insert and everything else in the room, we started fresh.  I wanted the walls in this house to be light tones compared to the darker earthy tones we had in our last house.  The thought of all white walls was very appealing to me, but I have three kids.   Two of them happen to be rowdy, wild boys with perpetually dirty hands.  I envisioned myself wiping down my walls each and every night before I went to bed.  No white walls here!  We chose a pale blue/gray color for this room.  We already had the coral color love seats from our last house and I had two wingback chairs upholstered in an amazing wool fabric I bought from a fabric warehouse going out of business ($4/yard).  I practically did cartwheels down the aisle when my sister-in-law found it.

That's the story with our casual living room.  This room continues to evolve.  I  am constantly moving things in and taking things out.  I love to change it up often.  What about you?  Once you get the look you are going for in a room, do you live with it for a long time or do you find yourself constantly tweaking it?

Here's a few before, in between and after photos of the living room.

Living Room Before

Living Room In Progress

And some more progress

The New Casual Living Room

The $4/yard fabric!

Found these at an antique store.  I bought them for the frames and mats, but the Chinese graphics kind of grew on me and I decided to keep them in the frame. I am linking to: Houseography