Living Room Progress

Living Room Progress

Hi guys! So we spent the whole weekend … sick. Wah wah. Both Andy and Joey ended up at the doctor on Friday. He has bronchitis, and she has an ear infection+cold. I “just” have a cold, so I’m actually doing pretty well. I’m like 90% well.

It wasn’t a complete misery-fest around here, though. We binge-watched SO MANY episodes of Gilmore Girls, haha. I started watching on Netflix a few weeks ago in anticipation of the new episodes coming out in November, and Andy got hooked along with me. Neither of us were really that into it originally. We both only watched a few episodes here and there, but now we think it’s pretty cute. Plus, it’s such a funny early 2000s time capsule.

Anyway, back before we were all sick, we did a bunch of rearranging in the living room. Ever since our kitchen renovation completed, our old dining room table was behind the couch in the living room. You can see it in the photos we posted a couple of months ago. The table was too big to put in our dining room and it was too heavy to move anywhere else by ourselves. Because of it, we couldn’t put all of the living room furniture back where it belonged, couldn’t put out any decor, couldn’t hang any art, and since some of our living room furniture was in the family room, we also couldn’t rearrange the family room. It was driving me INSANE and I felt so stuck and grumpy and just wanted to make a change. We finally got so frustrated that we decided to move the table to the garage (with heavy lifting help!) until we decide what we want to do with it. That meant we were able to put our credenza behind the couch and push the couch back a few feet away from the TV.

We are much more happy with this layout. Obviously nothing is styled or finished (the only things we put in the credenza so far are our records), but I’m excited for the opportunity to decorate with some pretty things out, hang some art and finally give this room more character. With the high ceilings, white walls, shiny white kitchen, grey couch, grey walls, it was feeling like a big, boring box.

Do you like how we’ve styled the top of my great-grandfather’s liquor cabinet? Ha!

And speaking of my great-grandfather, while we were moving things around, we thought, I wonder how his portrait would look on this wall…

We love it. We had never thought about putting something so old and dark in this room since we had such a bright white, modern vibe. His portrait looked so perfect in our old 1890s house, where it looked like it may have come with the house, but in our 1960s split-level with an uber-modern kitchen, it didn’t make sense… but yet it totally works. We love the dimension that this portrait brings to the room, and an eclectic mix of styles is what we love to do. Besides, it fills the huge wall well and is 100% free, which is the best part of all. I don’t even want to think how many hundreds even a print this size would cost, let alone a frame. Once we have a better idea of where things will be, we’ll hang him on the wall, so for now he’s just propped up.

I whipped up a little plan for this room:

A giant plant to transition from the kitchen to the living room (probably not a palm tree, but that would be fun, right?), some fun, colorful art above the liquor cabinet to complement/contrast the old guy, some “stuff” styled on top of the credenza, a side table between the couch and chair with a small lamp, and holy crap that orange chair needs to be reupholstered!

(P.S. do you spy the baby monitor? Clearly these photos are NOT staged, haha. I just picked up whatever mess/baby toys were lying around and made Andy move out of the way for a couple of minutes, but otherwise this is real life!!)