Home Style Evolution: Living Room

One of the things that my husband always made abundantly clear to me about this house, before I had a chance to see inside (people were living here!), was that the living room was huge. It is the biggest room in our house and I have had no trouble filling it up with large pieces of furniture.


This room is the most important room in the house, it is the room we "live in." Fitting that it's called a "living room," isn't it? So it's imperative that this room be inviting, and, above all clean and not cluttered. This is one of the rooms that seems to always be undergoing some sort of re-do. Whether I'm rearranging the placement of photographs hanging on the wall, changing the tablescapes or changing out decor, the living room is always my go-to place when I need a change. 





The photos below were shot the day we started to work on the house.

I swore that renovating this house would kill me. I'm not even gonna sugar coat it when I tell you that Aaron and I nearly broke off our engagement more than once because of the stress (and severe time crunch) we were under. 



At the end of it all, we got married (we're you worried?), and this is how our living room turned out. Keep in mind, it is decorated for Christmas here, because we moved in on 12/20, the day we got back from our honeymoon.

 

As you can see, we chose to paint the room two different colors. Honestly, folks, looking back at these photos, it doesn't even look like my house. I can't remember it ever looking like this. And what's more, I can't remember ever being happy with it looking like this. We chose a geometric print rug, because it had all of our colors in it. Reds and tans for the living room, greens for the kitchen, purples for the bathroom... they're all represented in that rug. I loved it for that reason, but nearly blew a vein when I read the price tag...

Here are some more shots from then...

Aaron broke the couch in the right way. Curtains are from Burlington Coat Factory.

Sofa table and lamps from Lowe's. In this shot you can see that our entertainment center hadn't been placed yet. These lamps are the same lamps sitting on either side of our bed now, but with different shades. Shop what ya got!!

Our handmade entertainment center.

This entertainment center was custom designed and made, by hand, by my Father-In-Law as our wedding gift. It is HUGE, taking up one entire wall in our living room, but it is loaded with storage spaces that I'm always coming up with new ideas for, and it is always a conversation piece when company comes over. I absolutely adore it.

In the Spring of 2010, we finally filled up the empty space in the red part of the room, which we had decided to turn into our own little music room.

Decor is a bit sparse in that area, as you can see!! haha!


For a while, honestly, nothing in the room changed, except for the placement of certain nick-knacks and the addition of wedding photos once we got them from the photographer.


We adopted a dog in 2010 who was a living terror. The three of us simply were not compatible. She created utter chaos in our house, so we surrendered her back to the shelter where she was promptly adopted by a family that she was compatible with, so no worries there! But because of her utter chaos, our geometric print rug was ruined (shampooing after shampooing did nothing to get rid of the smell). So we went ahead and purchased a new, more neutral one. I broke my heart to roll up my expensive rug and send it off to the dump, but I was so happy with my new rug that I danced for joy back down the driveway on trash day!

 

This is the best shot I have of it from that time. It's a cream color shag texture rug, size 5x8 from Wal-Mart and it was only around $80. A GREAT value. By this time, we had, clearly, adopted Tabby, who is the best behaved dog I've ever seen in my life. She'd rather explode than pee on this rug. 

We also got a new TV. The big one we had had earlier slap blew up on me one afternoon when I was watching a movie, so we got a new one, and unfortunately we had to basically sit the darn thing on the floor because our cabinet didn't have a TV stand built to match it. The one pictured above was a $30 put-it-together-yourself-er from Family Dollar. It served it's purpose very well for a good while, but we did so dislike the tv practically being on the floor.

 

This little TV stand came from a consignment shop in our town and I decided I wanted to put it here, to house all of our internet wires and cords and what not. Behind this table is where the only telephone jack in the entire house lives. 

 

 The "music corner" as we refer to it, filled up fast with music books!

Not long after the above photo was taken I finally took the plunge and painted over those red walls. And when we did, I changed out all the curtains in the room to a pretty cream set I found at Lowe's, of course.  You can see the difference the paint job did in the photo below. I repositioned my shelves (Family Dollar special!) and added a vase with some lit branches, both from Kirklands, in the corner, to lighten things up. (I started a trend, both my sisters in law now have something similar in their homes! :)

We re-purposed the red wood TV stand that had been sitting in the corner or the room, in front of the recliner, and actually turned it into a TV stand! We're wild like that, a TV stand into a TV stand... such rebellion! We had to saw the little nubby legs off of it to get it to fit, but at least out TV isn't practically sitting on the ground anymore! It made the room look much more put together!

It was so obvious. I don't know why I didn't think of it before!!

In 2013 we ended up purchasing new leather furniture (reclining sofa and loveseat!!!!) from Ashley Furniture, and a coffee table/end table set off of Craigslist for a steal! I'm in love with our living room furniture. It's US. It really is. And the best part about it is that with the right accesories (i.e. pillows, throw blankets) I can take the theme really modern or really country, or anything in between!

I'm slowly including more and more blue accents in my house, I'm simply obsessed with that teal blue color that is so popular in home decor these days. 

When I said slowly, I meant all at once. It feels like overnight my house went from tan and red to tan and blue. I love the blue so much, it's such a fun color and it makes me very happy! Aaron is the one that wanted the red in the beginning, not me, but now he's all about the blue too! We go to stores and he's like "hey, babe, wouldn't this blue sumthin-er-other look great in our house?" He's the best.


As of the present moment, this is what our Living Room looks like! (I will say this, the color of the walls is photographing MUCH darker than it actually is.) It's funny, I've been working on this post for about three weeks, and, because I've been working on this post, I've been really working on de-cluttering this room, and making it more open and airy. From the photographs I'd taken before, it became clear that I needed to rethink some of my decor choices. Including my el-cheapo Family Dollar bookshelves. No more words, here's the tour! (Excuse the gloominess outside. It's very rainy and yucky here today. So I've got Bewitched streaming on Crackle to chase away the yucky weather blues!)

 This is mainly my little area. I sit here, it's my "Sheldon Spot." (Did you catch that Big Bang Theory reference?)

 Our beautiful Entertainment Center is still as gorgeous as ever. Samantha and Endora were arguing over how to plant flowers at this particular moment on Bewitched!

Like I said before, I disassembled our Dollar Store shelves and put our least used books away into storage. The ones we use the most often I put into baskets and they are sitting in the corner.

Our lovely blue front door. At church I'm now known as "Lady with the Blue Door." As you can see in the bottom corner, we use the shoes in the basket method. It works very well for us. About once a week I go through all the shoes and put some away in our bedroom. Keeps me on top of the mountain!

Here's the main part of the room. We like big furniture, in case you couldn't tell.

Our couch, and the pillows that I think perhaps started the blue craziness. We got them at Kohls for about $10 a piece... marked down from $40 a piece. Yeah. It was a deal.

Recognize this table? It had been our entry table, but now it's a pretty little place for our phone to live. Yes, that's Germ-X, I'm a germaphobe. We keep our remote controls in the little basket that I bought in Charleston, SC years ago. And, of course, our beautiful wedding pictures above. I'm thinking about changing them to something a little different, but not sure what I want to do yet. I'll keep you updated! 

The piano area. I wish I had a bigger trunk. That one has all my childhood memories inside. 

This is the view you get coming down the hallway.


So there it is, folks! FINALLY my Living Room Evolution! I'm aware that my house isn't super fancy. I know that it isn't uber shabby chic. If my house could basically be Brooke's from All Things Thrifty, then I'd be a happy happy happy girl, but we just aren't there yet in our life. This is our first house. It's an old house. We are doing the best with what we have. But I am proud of the hard work we've done in making our house a home. Now, more than ever, I feel like this is home... for the time being. Thanks to fabulous people like Brooke, I'm always getting ideas for my house, and taking inventory and filing away ideas for our next house. That's what's so great about blogging. You don't have to have a cookie cutter house, you can get ideas and run with them in your own space. So Brooke, I doubt your reading this, but thank you for your amazing blog. My house would probably still be red and gold without you! 


Who's to say this is the end of the transformation for my living room? Certainly not me! 

I hope you enjoyed looking through the transformation of my living room and walking down memory lane with me.

Up next is the KITCHEN post. And... let me just tell ya, I'm excited to share it with you! 

So thanks a ton for stopping by! I'll see you next time on The Simple Life!