Living Room Progress

My living room has been a work in progress since I bought the house. It started out as a big, tan empty box with dirty walls and badly worn floors. Something like this

So far we've replaced the HUGE picture window to the energy efficient Pella vinyl style we used in the rest of the house, and replaced the warped wood front door with a new steel one. We lived with the badly scratched wood floors for about a year before we finally had those refinished too. That was a smelly process, but worth the results. The walls are painted in Behr paint's Underwater, which I love with the white trim. The room gets a lot of light, and is broken up by the large window, and a couple doorways, so the darker color hasn't been an issue at all.

I have to say, Behr paint has been a great find for me. It's what I used throughout the whole house and it has great coverage. I was able to paint over the existing taupe paint in one coat, which I thought was pretty great. The only paint I wasn't happy with was the ceiling white, which seemed a little runnier and didn't cover as evenly as the regular stuff.


I had a wool rug from Lowe's in here originally that Murray eventually chewed up. It was recently replaced with one I've been stalking at West Elm. I'll have to get a new picture of that soon.

These pictures were how the room looked shortly after I moved in. Funny how clean it looked before I had a husband and dog living there haha. Actually I hadn't met Ted yet at this point, and we got Murray shortly after we started dating. You can see that the curtains are actually taped up with painters tape. It took me a while to figure out what to do with this window. I'm still not totally happy with it, but don't want to spend a fortune on it when I know we'll only live here a couple more years.


The furniture is from the following stores:
Sofa and side chair: UBU in Rivertown mall
Coffee Table: Crate and Barrel (no longer available)
End Tables: Target
Lamps: Sears
TV Stand: Cost Plus World Market
Ottoman: Target


The only thing I regret was not opting to have the couch stain treated. It would have been an extra couple hundred dollars, which at the time seemed like a lot, but now with a dog sounds like a great idea. It's amazing what I've been able to vacuum off that thing though amazingly enough.

These are how the room looks today on the left side (minus my awesome new rug). Murray was looking at me like she was mad I was interrupting her nap time. As you can see by the lovely couch cover that never stays in place, we've had to find an alternative to a very light colored fabric + dog feet. 


I've never been happy with the brown sheer curtains since I've put them up. It looks so much brighter and nicer without them on the window, but then we have NO privacy. Normally, I'd just pull them open in the daytime, but the window is so wide we needed three panels to cover it, and the support poles get in the way of shoving the middle panel to one side. Therefore it looks dumb to leave them open, so they just stay closed all day. I also don't love the fact that the couch covers up a lot of the window, but alas there's no other place for it in the room.

This is a view of the other side of the room. I loved the fireplace and built in shelves when I bought the house. What I didn't realize was how tricky it would be to find things to put on the shelves, which are only about two inches deep. I didn't really change much about the fireplace, except to add new 6" slate tiles to the surround. Several of the original red terra cotta tiles were badly cracked and didn't fit my vision, so they had to go.

This is Murray's Mur Monster face. Had to sneak this in here :)

I have a few pieces I've found here and there for the built in shelves, but I'm still not happy with the cluttery look they have going on. Ideally, I'd like to find a bunch of milk glass pieces to use here, but the search hasn't been productive so far. I think the white would stand out nicely against the paint color, but again, the shallow depth has made things tricky. So far, my very favorite thing I've bought for them is my Jonathan Adler ceramic weiner dog.

I love him :) I wish I could afford a bunch more of the stuff in the animal series, but sadly they're not in the budget. The rest of the stuff in the shelves is a hodgepodge of random stuff that I would love to replace as I find things I like better. So anyway, it's a work in progress, along with most of the rest of the house.