Our Living Room Is Starting to Come Together (A 4-year update)
THE FARMHOUSE
Our Farmhouse living room is a grand space with large windows, 100-year-old millwork, and giant pocket doors and I’ve never felt like I’d been doing it justice. Over the past four years I tried 3 couches in here, a dozen or more furniture placements, swapped out rugs and tables, and generally scratched my head over it. I’ve struggled with this space (as much as decorating a room can ever be a struggle anyway). But I think, maybe…finally…this room is coming together, and I wanted to share it today.
Chandelier, Sofa, Drapes, Jute rug, (see more sources at the bottom of this post)
Our living room is still far from perfect but it’s functional and pretty and I was able to use furnishings we mostly had on hand. And we’ve made some headway. When we originally bought the Farmhouse, this room was covered in carpet. Nice, high-quality carpet, but carpet all the same. We pulled it up to reveal the original fir floors and patched some small holes from the carpet stretcher. Here’s a photo from the day we moved in (those carpet lines!).
Then we painted, bought a couch, and replaced the light fixture. I thought we were pretty much done, but looking back, we were just getting started.
Eventually I splurged on linen blackout drapes for the room (btw sources are all below). Old houses can get a little drafty especially in a room so full of windows, and these drapes help make the winter evenings cozy. We also tried our white chairs that used to be in the upstairs bedrooms down here (they’ve made the trip up and down the stairs a few times since).
And then our white IKEA couch made an appearance (we bought it for staging the Porch House in 2017) and the kid’s teepee.
And now, bypassing approximately 10 furniture layouts, we come to today…
This fall we swapped the blue velvet couch for the gray velvet couch we had at our Dexter House Airbnb. The white chairs came back down. The vintage rug got layered over a jute rug. And the coffee table I’ve been meaning to replace for years, didn’t get replaced. But we did bring in an antique round table and armoire and a couple wooden chairs for additional seating. Oh and we hung art. It feels like we finally moved in 😉
I’m not exactly sure why I’ve struggled so much with decorating this space, but I’m sure it has to do with the fact it’s at least double the size of any living room we’ve had in the past. Plus living rooms have never been my strong suit. Give me a kitchen or a bathroom or a tricky small space that needs remodeled and I’m all there. But living rooms and dining rooms that just need decorated and not renovated leave me feeling like I’m in the weeds.
Our basement has basically become a mini antique store now that we’ve added the Dexter House’s furnishings to our stash. So when I say we worked with what we had…we had a lot. The round table belonged to my great grandmother and is a favorite of mine. I love having it in the living room as a games space (okay mostly a lego space) and it gets used everyday. The art was all in our basement, having been used at other houses in the past.
And let us not forget the giant armoire. Our living room also functions as our primary play room, so most of the kid’s toys are in that armoire (I swap out bins in the basement occasionally). And goodness, I love this piece! It came from Normandy, France and we bought it on Craigslist back when we lived in Seattle. We had to move it out of this great big Victorian home on Capital Hill and I’m amazed it made it down all those stairs in one piece. I had originally planned to use it at the Dexter House as a built-in closet (an idea I am still itching to try) but it never happened. So it sat in that basement until this summer. And now we have a giant armoire full of toys in our living room and I’m just happy to have the clutter behind doors.
Well that’s our living room…at least for now. I’d still like to replace the coffee table and our TV setup (see below). And all the neutrals could use a print or two and a little color…but we’re getting there..
Sources
Paint color: BM Revere Pewter at 50%
Ceiling paint: tinted to BM Simply White
Chandelier (in old brass)
Sofa (in Narwahl velvet)
Jute rug (9’x12’)
Vase (similar)
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And now for the embarrassing part….here’s our TV setup. We have way too many cords and not enough storage and I felt compelled to show you for sake of honesty. I’m a home blogger and this is what our TV situation looks like 😬
