Three Cheers for our New Living Room

It's hump day but I am finally getting around to blogging about some of our new living room upgrades.  Our living room is my favorite room in our house right now.  I feel like we really maximized the space, and this is in large part to our new couch! 

The great part about living in a 91 year old house is the charm.  It's everywhere!  The downside is that some of the rooms are just oddly shaped. Let's face it-they were made for smaller people and not always for entertaining!  This is exactly the case of our living room!  It's great, but boy, its shaped oddly.  This really caused us to have to change our furniture to make this room functional.  Let me show you a bit what I mean:

See that above?  That was what our living room looked like when we viewed the house, with the previous owners décor.  Great fireplace right?  Only issue is its so high it was not made for a large screen TV like us 21st century Americans have!  This left us with a bit of a problem.

Above is a recent photo of our living room now.  We lightened up the paint and simplified the mantel with a nice mirror and some recycled glass.  Simple, just how I like it.


Our next issue was related to our large (yet comfy) dark leather couches.  We love them, but they are too dark and were just too large for the space. I'll spare you the before photos, but here is the other side of the room with our new couch. 

We love our new sectional and we decided to spring for this baby.  We used the free design services at Pottery Barn to find a couch that fit our space.  Did you know PB will send a designer to your house to help you?  There is no obligation to buy a PB piece of furniture, but no doubt it does not make it easier to make a purchase with their furniture since they can line up the dimensions for you.  We chose to get a slip covered couch because of our dogs and for the future so we never have to stress over stains on our white furniture.  We got to chose the fabric and the color and went with Cotton Canvas in natural to keep the room really light and airy. 

Those Pottery Barn-like white frames were actually a Hobby Lobby steal of a deal!  We got them 40% off which made them about 5-8 dollars each.  A simple printable search on the internet landed me the art in the farms. 

The next step was dressing up our couch with pillows from Target and TJ Maxx.

Oh...and for those wondering, yes that dog gate is due to a bit of training that needs to happen for our two dogs who are used to making their home on our old couch. :)

We still have a nice project list for this room, mainly:

1.  Find a 9 by 12 rug (absolutely going to be using RUGS USA for this baby!)
2.  Find a wing back chair that can go nicely in the corner
3.  Buy a lamp that can hand over the back of the couch.  We have our eyes set on one at Target.
4. Find a great rollable tv stand where we can put our tv safely since we can't keep it on the mantel.


So, for a 91 year old house, I think we made some pretty nice upgrades-what do you think?