It’s a real living room

We moved into our new (really old) house in early April, and 3 months later our living room is finally starting to look/ feel like ours. We spent about a month figuring out how we naturally use the space. Like where we like throw our keys and bags… Where did the shoes naturally pile up? Where should the tv live? Where does my purse land? Then we started moving stuff around. And around. And then we painted the beige walls, hunted down lots of new to us furniture, and hung some pics on the wall. By no means is she done, but she’s certainly feeling a lot more like ours.

This is basically the same set up we had in our Florida apartment. You can see the pocket door in progress on the left side of the picture. (Lots more on that soon.)

And then I found a pillow box… yay! What a difference a few pillows make.

Here’s the view from what is now a pocket door looking into what we call the fireplace living room, because well, it has a fireplace!

I tossed our DIY thumbprints on top of the mantle for some instant cuteness. The walls don’t look so beige in this picture, but the lighting is tricky because the walls are the same color as the celling!

Here’s a full room view. And we basically lived like this until my mom showed up in mid May and kicked my butt into gear! I could not decide on a paint color. I stared and stared at those walls and looked at bazillions of paint chips. I wanted something neutral that would show off the molding. Grey. It’s the cool thing to do, I guess. But, it’s just a nice neutral color. Picking the perfect shade of grey… that’s a story for another post.  

My mom is pretty awesome. She came and stayed with us for a weekend and turned our living room around in no time! My birthday is at the end of June, so she bought me a few birthday presents! She bought us Karl from Ikea. It was a super, super deal. I had my little heart set on white version of this bad boy, but then we saw the black one near the check out line in the “As Is” section of IKEA (one of my favorite spots in the whole store!) My mom and Andy convinced me that black is better than white anyway, and my mom said that since it is such a good deal she would buy us a few more goodies, Sold! We got a black KARLSTAD Ikea couch for the living room! And let me tell you, this couch is about 100 times more comfortable than the fancy futon in the above picture. I vow to never buy an armless  couch again. Oh and say hi to Lacie, my mom’s poodle!

Here’s the super good deal part:

So, with the $415 left in the budget mama bought us a FALSTER table and 4 TOBIAS chairs for the other side of the room. The table is meant to be an outdoor table, but it’s working perfectly for us indoors, and it’s so dang pretty! We are really happy to have it. I’ve always admired the TOBIAS chairs for some time now, so when mom said she was getting us chair, I literally ran to show her my long lost IKEA chair crushes! The rug is another item I’ve been crushin’ on for years! I would swoon every time I saw it in Taylor’s instgram pics, and I knew one day I had to have her! The LAPPLJUNG RUTA rug is a killer deal at only $69.99 for 6’7″x 6’7″. So here is the other side of the fireplace living room.

I’m getting way ahead of myself because now you’re looking at the painted walls, which was a big fat mess. But, while I’m at it here’s one last pic of the whole room, so far. Oh yea, if you follow me on instagram, we did add a giant mirror to the opposite wall of this room too (see that pic here)! Instagram is where you can see the real time house/room updates! I’m a little behind on the ol’ blog.

So, there she is, as of now. I still need to spill the beans about how and why we built a pocket door, the brass cleaning madness that happened to the free bar we picked up in FL, the grey wall fiasco, the shadow box I made rom the goodies I found in the cabinet (it’s above the bar!). Anyone else in the midst of a room makeover? Painting walls grey? Buying lots of fun IKEA furniture? Do you have a white couch and love it? Would you never buy a whiter couch? Spill the beans, folks… I’d love to hear…