Blog

   

Around the House: Living Room Revamp

I normally don’t like to admit when I’m wrong. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often, but this is one case where I have to say, I think I was wrong. Let me explain.

For almost three years, we’ve lived with our living room looking like this:

And it was fine. But I never loved it. My thought process was that we needed the TV to be above the fireplace. I didn’t want to have two competing focal points in the room, and so every other furniture decision was based around that. But I never loved it. The entrance to the room, either from the garage door or from the kitchen seemed cramped and cut off. The largest wall in the space seemed bare, and the lighting always seemed dark. (There is little overhead lighting in here and we rely on lamps to keep it bright.)

But I thought it was ok, and you get used to things when you see them everyday. And if the TV had to be over the fireplace, I was convinced this was the best arrangement.

And then I saw this (originally from this lovely blog):

Link

And it was like a light-bulb went off. There’s no ‘have to’. This is my house and I can do whatever I want. It was a liberating moment. And this beautiful room (that happens to be very similarly laid out to ours) gave me the inspiration I needed to get over my mental block about the TV and fireplace.

That night I convinced Brett to help me move the vintage radio from the reading room into the living room. Having the TV lower and closer to the couch makes it seem about twice as big, so he wasn’t hard to convince. Dania helped too since I was still in recover mode from foot surgery (and she threw out a few ‘I-told-you-so’s’ while she was at it). We did a little furniture shake-up. And now it looks like this:

And the view into the kitchen:

You can see here how much more open the entrance to the living room is. I love it. This isn’t quite final yet, because now that we know we love it, we plan to mount the TV on the wall so we can clear up the extra storage table you might have seen to the right of the radio (it’s currently holding the cable box). We’re also scouting some other new pieces, but we’ll see how that goes. A new couch might be a little harder to convince Brett of.

So in this case, I’m glad I admitted my mistake, got over my rule-phobia, and tried something new. So far everyone who’s come over has said they much prefer it this way. My brother even said this was “the best thing you’ve done since you moved it”. That may be a biased opinion due to the seemingly increased TV size, but hey, I’ll take it.

Have you ever had an idea stubbornly stuck in your head, and then suddenly realized how dumb it was?? Just me?

Dawn

4 Comments

  • Catherine Crandall

    Bravo! You did the right thing to move your furniture and decors into that beautiful set up. Now, the light coming from the window is perfectly shining in that room, and that is awesome. I love your sofas and pillows, they looked so good in that grayish wall paint. I can’t wait until you totally finished your desired look for your living room.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Catherine Crandall Cancel reply