Adding Color

Mission: Add Color to the Living Room

Our living room is kind of dark and dull. You see a lot of movies filled shelves and dark furniture. Don't get me wrong, I love me some black & brown, but it got a little obsessive. We wanted to liven it up and add some color to the living room. We've rearranged the furniture several times and I think the missing piece was always color. I think we're on our way. 


We've moved the room around a few times (will show later), and we were procrastinating, and the best thing to do while procrastinating is...do something productive so you don't feel guilty for procrastinating! 


So we decided to move the furniture back to the way we had it originally, but with an ottoman rather than the giant coffee table, we moved the little end lamp, and changed things around. 


Here are the changes:

 

1. A few years ago, Alex painted the fireplace red & brown. You can kinda see in this picture, it's your standard white fireplace...as you can see by the fan next door...it gets hot in Georgia! 


The walls are the same color, just different lighting. I'm now slightly wishing it was black not brown, but we have some brown furniture pieces so I guess it matches!

2.We changed original window treatment to brown curtains to nothing and then as of yesterday to a nice red! We're still missing something on the walls, working on the toilet paper art (although Alex thinks we're doing a chalk board sorta thing). I think the red is rich and warm (and provides a bit of sun protection). We spent more than we wanted too on curtains, but getting them at Target was cheaper than nicer curtains. The material is burlap which makes it a little thicker. 


As you can see, the cats enjoy it! In one of the previous room reiterations, we had the TV in front of the window. That worked well unless I was outside and Gus had to be near me, or the cat walked behind it carefully switching the TV switch off every time...yeah that was fun...


Oh you can also see we removed the blue window treatment from the door and added brown blinds. This was a Gus separation anxiety issue as he ruined quite a bit of the blinds. I did learn how to restring the blinds though! It was surprisingly pretty easy!

3. We gave back the nice coffee table to my in-laws basement, and got an ottoman which Alex painted. The coffee table we had before was great & big. However it was a giant 2.5'x2.5' foot glass giant sucker that took up a lot of room! I semi-wish we would have purchased an ottoman that had two sides (you can flip just half of the top). But this one works. The cats like to lay on it (of course they do). It works well for what it is and I like having the extra storage space for blankets, etc.

4. We painted the fan yellow & red. 
This poor fan needs to be cleaned more often, the dirt was nasty! Yuck...come to think of it, I need to dust my fans more often anyway. Alex kept saying, Oh it's LSU colors. I had to keep telling him LSU is gold & purple, but what do I know! 


It does kind of look like a Gryffindor scarf, but I really like it. I can't wait to have kids so I can paint their fan! I like the rings on the end too. It just helps to add that little bit of color to the massive amount of white on the ceiling!

5. Alex took a blanket and tucked it into the back of the couch, giving the couch an accent wall to speak. I'm not big on accent walls, but I actually don't think this is that bad. 


 It's just a large blanket we got from Target (that I frequently use, and thus can no longer....). He just tucked it under the cushions on each side and boom an accent couch! He tends to do this sorta stuff while I'm away...that'll learn me! (Yes that was said wrong as a joke).

 6. Sixth, we changed the cushion pillows, I'm not sure what happened to the original ones...I'm going to blame Gus on this one (we had a rough coming of age with him)...Plus they aren't really comfy anymore. So we have two yellow & a red one!

Final Before and After Pictures

 We still have a few things left...mainly the spot between the shelf & the window. However, all in all, I think I like the new layout! The original layout is on the right. I couldn't find clear pictures of the middle format where we rotated everything one wall. But I think these improvements are good anyway!  I'm still surprised that darn couch is hanging around...it was a hand-me-down from my parents, so it's probably 12-13 years old? Yikes!