Rearranging some Rooms – Cuz We’re Random Like That

About once every 6 months or so I get the itch to rearrange furniture. Sometimes it’s just a little tweak, like moving our bed from one side of the room to the other. And other times, it’s a massive overhaul of multiple rooms, or all rooms…?, throughout our home. I have always been this way. I remember as a 10 year old BEGGING my parents to switch their dining room and living room. They never gave in. I just thought it would be fun to dine in the living room, people! Ah!

So now that I’m a big girl, living in a space of my own, I guess there’s nothing keeping me from doing something wild and crazy like that. And thankfully, my husband doesn’t mind helping me drag our furniture all around every couple months.

Right now we have a large family room (that we’re currently using as an office/family room/playroom) that has a pass-through to the kitchen as well as a large dining room and a large living room on the other side of the house. Since the day we moved in, it has not sat well with us to have two living areas. We just don’t like the redundancy, nor do we have enough furniture to fill two living areas.

We love the living room so much more for relaxing but whenever we entertain (with Dave’s family), everyone typically congregates in the family room because that’s what Dave’s family used to do (when his parents lived here) and since we’ve got a couch and chairs in there, that’s what naturally happens. My theory is that if the comfy furniture was all moved out of the family room and into the living room, guests would be “forced” into the living room.

And my Aunt Connie recently gave us a baby grand piano and I recently scored a large area rug on Rugsusa.com. So all these things factored together, and the other day I was shifting some furniture around and I thought…”Hey, what if I moved the large dining room table into the family room? and then used the formal living / dining rooms as a living / music room?” That would allow us to use the living room for lounging, the current dining room for the new larger piano and some seating (a.k.a. a music room) and the family room as the office/ informal dining room (because quite honestly, we don’t get too formal around here…).

And then I thought about it for a while longer and while sitting here at the computer in our office area inside the family room, I looked over at the built in bookshelves and thought “Man, they would be great as a built-in china cabinet” and considering we don’t have a china cabinet and that’s basically what has held me up from even using our china for the past 5+ years, I think this would be a fabulous idea to move our dining table over here.


Here are a couple inspirational images I’m going with for now:

We have a large window on the west wall of the now family room similar to this. We’d have a great view while dining in front of the window. It would definitely be a sunny cheerful dining area and it’s by far the largest room in the house so it would be terrific for holding large family gatherings like we often do.


I’d love to create an informal vintage industrial feel kind of like these next few photos:

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I could even pull our wicker chairs back in from the mudroom and pair them with our dining table and possibly some new industrial chairs (?).

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I’m not EXACTLY sure how all this is going to shake down. I admit this idea is half-baked. I love it and all, but I recently began doing a lot of in home daycare for family and friends so I feel the need more than ever for a family friendly living area for the kids to play. And someday I plan on homeschooling so I’m not 100% sold on this idea since I have been using the family room more casually and the living/dining rooms as more formal zones. I’m a bit on the fence. But what do you guys think?

Should I go for it? For now I think I should at least give it a try. We can always move the furniture back around again later if we don’t fall in love.

Living Room Ideas

Oh my. Just realized the blog header still displays photos of our old house. And we've been here an entire month already!! I'll get to it someday...I promise. :)

In the meantime, I want to share a few ideas I have spinning around in my head for the Living Room here in our new place (which I realize you haven't even seen yet). Will also share that soon, I promise. We'll be getting it all cleaned up to host the family Christmas party soon, so I can't wait to share it.

We're planning to patch the walls and repaint the room. Right now I'm leaning towards some shade of gray with crisp white trim and a white ceiling.

And I've been busy gathering a few inspiring photos over on my Pinterest Page.

In fact, our living room is pretty similar to this first one with 2 windows side by side just like that facing out to the road. I enjoyed seeing the use of gray and brown together in this photo because we'll be working with what we have and putting our brown leather couch in there.

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And this photo from Jones Design Company gives me a good idea of what the crisp white trim will look like with the gray walls. And I love the colorful pillows on the couch. I also enjoyed seeing the tan carpeting alongside gray walls.

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Here's another gray room with white trim and some great pops of color. Love the zebra print chair. How fun! And it shows me how gray walls look with green carpet, since that's what is in there right now.

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This photo also reminds me a lot of our living room with the 2 windows side by side. I pinned this probably 6 months ago when we were still trying to finish up our other house and get it on the market. I just love the mirror above the fireplace and that fascinating light fixture. Just a really neat space.

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And I found this photo particularly interesting since I've had a thing for orange lately and its a great example of gray, brown and orange playing together nicely. Even though the walls are brown and the couch is gray here...in our room, those elements would be switched.

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Overall, I want to evoke a nice comfy, casual feeling in the room. Dave & I are not much for really formal living areas, and I want Levi and his cousins and any other future kidlets that we may have to feel like they can play there and enjoy the living room too.

The bones of the room will be pretty neutral (the walls, the couch, etc.) so they won't have to change when our tastes quickly change. And then I'll bring in some fun colors in curtains, pillows (probably a lot of pillows I already own from all over the house), accent chairs, and maybe a rug, that could all be swapped out easily in the future on a whim.

I'm planning to include our wicker chairs with the bold green cushions from our old house's front room. They actually match the existing carpet in the room. So that makes it fun.

So, what do you think? Anyone else paint anything gray lately? I guess gray is the new beige this decade...or something like that. :) I've seen all kinds of fun gray rooms online as well as gray furniture, gray kitchen cabinets, gray built-ins, etc. Guess I'm jumping on the gray wagon.

Day 21 - Clutter Free Living / Family Room

It's Day 21 of the 31 Days to a Clutter Free Home series. Today we'll be tackling clutter in the Living / Family Room.

These are probably some clutter generators in this room:
1. DVDs/CDs
2. Decor items (photographs, trinkets, blankets, pillows, etc.)
3. Toys
4. Office / exercise paraphernalia

You may not have all of the above, but you probably have 1 or 2 of these areas that are issues for your family.

1. DVDs / CDs If you have a collection of DVDs or CDs, it is imperative that you come up with some sort of system to store them so they don't get damaged and so you can easily find one when you want it.

We no longer have a TV in our home (and we usually just listen to Pandora streaming online radio), so that pretty well takes care of this area for us. :) But for those of you who do have these items, here are some helpful ideas.

As usual, I'm a fan of closed storage. You very easily could just set all your DVDs / CDs on a bookshelf, being sure to alphabetize them by Title so it is easy to find the one you want. But I feel that would be too visually cluttered for me. (And too tempting for little kids to pull off the shelves...)

So...I would recommend sorting your movies into various categories (drama, comedy, kids, etc.) and then designate one storage box to each category, being sure to label it accordingly, and being sure to alphabetize them inside the box. Kind of like this...

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You could similarly categorize your movies and store them in binders and label the binders. These decorative ones can be found on Amazon.

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2. Decor items (photographs, trinkets, blankets, pillows, etc.) This is an area that can easily get out of control. I recommend stepping back and looking at your living area as if you're seeing it for the first time. Do you have one too many photographs or candles sitting around? Has the decorative tree in the corner seen better days? Are the patterns on your furniture and in your rug conflicting with each other?

You are not MARRIED to your belongings. If you don't like something anymore, DONATE it or THROW IT AWAY! If you think you want to get rid of something but have guilt about doing so, try taking it out and putting in storage in the attic or something for a year. If you haven't even thought about it all year when you find it up there again, it's probably safe to get rid of it!

This is what our great room used to look like:

And after several rounds of purging and redecorating, this is what it looks like today:

We got rid of conflicting patterns, lots and lots of trinkets, stowed the scrapbooks and blankets out of sight and got rid of the seldom used exercise equipment.

3. Toys. Limit the amount of toys that you keep in the living area. Consider banning all toys to kids' bedrooms or playrooms. And if you do keep toys in the living area, designate a spot for them such as a toy chest, cedar chest, storage ottoman, or bookshelf with categorized baskets, so they can be put away. We keep Levi's toys in a woven storage ottoman that we got from Garden Ridge for under $30. It is very easy for him to get them out and to clean up each night before bed. And the ottoman doubles as an end table between our loveseat and chair.

4. Office / exercise paraphernalia. If you're like me and live in a smallish house and prefer to keep your home office or exercise stuff in the living area so you can multi-task, brainstorm some way to make it seem less obvious. We wanted our home office in the living area but did not want our bills and bank statements sitting out on a desk for all to see and we didn't want to shove an unsightly metal filing cabinet in the corner either. So I decided to condense our home office into a computer armoire and now we can just close the doors when company comes.

See more about that project here. 

If you want to keep exercise equipment in there, consider hiding a ball or step behind the sofa when not in use or stash some hand weights in your coffee table drawer...anything you can do to make it less obvious.


Did I miss anything? Any other types of clutter taking over your living areas that you'd like me to address?

Check back tomorrow for more tips on creating a Clutter Free Home!

Great Room - Before & After

We are blessed to have a large 18 ft x 20 ft Great Room that was built on to the back of our home {somewhere in the early 90s I'm guessing}. Check out the floor plan for more info:

It really is by far the most spacious room in our home with vaulted ceilings and 3 large windows and a large sliding glass door overlooking our wooded 1 acre lot. There's even a working wood-burning fireplace in one corner. This was always our favorite room in the house, so when doing our whole house makeover over the past few years, we were determined to accentuate the positives of this room.

Here are some icky, yucky before photos. At that point in time, we used our front room as a TV room and had a dining area, piano and sitting area set up in this room. There was a lot going on.

We had purchased the couch and overstuffed leather chair and ottoman when we got married but practically everything else in the room was free/gifted from friends/ family members. Looking back, I cringe because I do not like all the patterns we had going on along with the dark wood trim. And the clutter and trinkets. That's the part I really don't like.

We went on a Bungalow tour of homes in Broad Ripple (a part of Indy) once and that day forever changed my perspective in decorating. I remember going into the homes and being amazed at how there was nothing sitting out. Now, that could be because they had 100's of strangers wandering thru their homes those days and they took their personal effects out, but....Dave & I were both struck with how much we loved the simplicity and peaceful feeling that no visual clutter evoked. So we set out on a 5 year journey of purging and decluttering in an effort to achieve that sparce look.

Nowadays we have our home staged to try to sell it so that explains why we pretty much have NOTHING out, but honestly, I love it. There's so much less for our 1 year old to get into, there's less to dust around, etc. I have just found that I'm a lot more apt to dust the top of a piece of furniture if I don't have to first unload 15 things from it!

So, getting back to the Great Room.... The walls were painted off-white with a flat paint by previous owners so over the years with normal wear and tear, they were beginning to look rather dingy and there were some nails and seams popping out of the drywall that needed to be repaired. We knew we wanted to choose a warmer color for the walls that would make the room feel cozier. We chose Valspar "Arid Plains" for the walls, from Lowe's. We painted the ceiling white and the trim and mantle a high gloss white.

The old flooring was cherry laminate. It had several areas that had gotten wet and bubbled over the years so it needed to be replaced. We opted for a speckled frieze carpet. The speckles make dirt seem less obvious and the soft carpet and pad are great for our little boy to play. Not to mention it is very comfy underfoot.

After 3 years of this room looking like this (it acted as a storage space as we worked on all the other rooms), it is so nice to have this space back!

This room formerly had 1 ceiling fan in the middle of the room and it was always too dark and sometimes a little stuffy since it was added onto the house so we added in a second ceiling fan and now the room stays nice and cool on hot summer days and is very well lit. We also ended up replacing the 3 windows and the patio door for more energy efficient models. That also drastically improved the heating/cooling in this added on room.

We purchased brushed nickel curtain rods from Lowe's and white IKEA Ritva curtain panels for a nice floor-to-ceiling look.

David purchased the N.A. Noel painting, "December" over the fireplace off ebay from someone all the way in Canada and reframed it with ancient oak barn siding from his parent's corn crib in Ohio that was damaged in a wind storm. The irony of that is the artist's gallery is located just 10 miles from our home! I think the frame adds so much to the painting. I just love it! There's chipped white and red paint on the wood that brings out the colors in the painting.

I purchased the woven storage ottoman shown below from Garden Ridge for just $25. It is extremely nice to have for Levi's toys and it forces us to edit his "collection" so that we don't end up with way more toys than we need in our living area. And even though he's only 13 months old he already knows how to clean up and put his toys away. He did it this afternoon without me even asking him to!

We reused our plaid sofa although I'd replace it with an IKEA Ektorp slipcovered sofa in a heartbeat if money were not an issue. We also reused our leather chair and ottoman. And we scored the dark brown leather loveseat from my parents' garage. Mom purchased it a few years ago then decided she needed a wider sofa rather than a loveseat.

The armoire in the corner, shown below, houses our home office. More can be found on that here. The straight back chair next to it was inherited from David's Aunt who got it from David's Granny.

I also hope to someday refinish the coffee table and matching end tables (that are currently in our guest room). They have dark wood tops and hunter green legs. You know their type. You probably saw them in many a home back in the early 90s. But I will wait for now until I decide more what color I want to go with and if I have a new couch or something.

And here's my attempt at doing what "The Nester" recommended on InCourage one day. Her idea is GENIUS! I placed this drop leaf table in the room with basically nothing on it. And I love it. It is very handy if I need a place to sit down and write a note or do the bills, or even I would ever have a chance to scrapbook or work a puzzle (ha! with a 1 year old I don't see that happening...). Once again, like with dusting, if I have to take the time to clear off a space to use it to work/play, it just won't happen! I don't want knick-knacks to get in the way of living around here.

It is SO nice to have a table other than the one we eat our meals at so we don't have to pick up what we're working on just to eat dinner.

Here's a rough breakdown (estimated from memory) on what we spent on this room transformation:

Drywall repair - we hired a professional to speed up the process due to the large size of this room and the vaulted ceilings - $1,500

Paint (for walls, ceiling, trim, primer also) - $165

Carpet - $820 (I definitely recommend shopping around - this was my 3rd stop, a local store, after estimates of $1600 and $1200 - and they installed it 3 days later as opposed to Lowe's schedule of 3 weeks out!)

New windows and door - $700 materials + $320 labor = $1020

Storage ottoman - $25

Computer Armoire - $100

And that's pretty much it since the rest of our furniture we already owned!

TOTAL - $3,630

Holy cow. Once again I'm pretty amazed at how much that cost us! But I still feel we were being pretty frugal. I need to figure out how other people do things cheaper! Cuz I already have so many other things that I'd love to do such as get a new sofa, a storage ottoman as big as our coffee table, new arm chairs, a rug, etc, etc, etc. Hhhhhhh....patience....But for fun, I did create a mood board here that helps me keep up hope that someday I can do a bit of a makeover.

I'm linking this up to the Roomspiration blog hop and link party at View Along the Way. Check it out for lots more living room inspiration.

Living Room Mood Board

A while back Beth from Home Stories A2Z posted about using a couple tools: Polyvore and Design Seeds. I was so excited to find out about these tools and give them a little try. At first, I browsed the color palettes inspired by photos from nature available on Design Seeds and found this one: {Olive Hues}. I was in love.

I'm realizing it is similar to the color scheme of our current home. Apparently I'm drawn to these colors...see...

Great Room:

Kitchen:

Front Room Sitting Area:

Master Bedroom:

Guest Room:

So then I followed Beth's instruction on her

Polyvore tutorial video to create this Living Room Mood Board:

Living Room Mood Board Olive Hues by dnkneer on Polyvore.com

Isn't that amazing? I am so thankful for other bloggers and how they share such great ideas!
If you're interested in recreating this look, here's a source list with prices:

White IKEA Vivan curtains ($19.99 / pair x 3 windows = $60)

IKEA Ektorp Sofa - Idemo Light Brown ($499)

IKEA Ektorp Chair - Svanby Green ($399)

Target Athens Slipper Chair - Chocolate (On sale for $249)

Gallery wall of black and white frames (you could even spray paint ones that you already own)

Outdoor Rugs by Martha Stewart Living ($249) - this could easily be reduced to $100 or so from HomeGoods or Garden Ridge

Lazy Susan Resin Layered Leaf Mirror ($160) - you could easily replicate this with a mirror from Garden Ridge for maybe $80

Corbett Coffee Table Storage Ottoman ($280) - I've seen these for $150 at Garden Ridge

PB Teen armoire ($2,600!!!!) - My computer armoire off Craigslist only cost $100. I'm sure that there are many alternatives to paying $2,600! I was just clicking around on Polyvore and selected this to have a tall piece of furniture in the mix...

Imperial Trellis Green pillow - Etsy ($50) - but I've been known to find awesome pillows at Garden Ridge for $9.99 so you could definitely save in this category.

End table found on Pinterest (source unknown) - but you could find something at Target or HomeGoods for most likely under $100 or a garage sale or CL for a lot less than that.

And in my opinion, no living room is complete without a piano, so I added that in. :) Usually you can find them for $500 or less. (Free if you already have one)

Grand Total - $2,700 (or $1,680 for the cheaper version....still a little steep for me, but oh well...this is just for fun!)



So what do you think? My favorite piece of furniture that I'm proposing here is the large round storage ottoman. Ever since reading this post from Young House Love I realized that even they have clutter in their home, but they just know where to conveniently hide it, I've been singing the praises of the storage ottoman.

At this point in time, I have 2 in my Great Room (1 for piano books and 1 for toys) as well as 1 in the master bedroom to store swimwear, extra toiletries and random stuff that is sitting out. I find I have to clean it about once a week or it fills up with random clutter and begins to not be able to close. The only thing that might be better is a trunk that has some sort of latch that would confound my 1 year old son so he couldn't get into the master bedroom ottoman and the piano book ottoman since last week he ripped my ancient copy of Fur Elise that I inherited from my grandmother! Ah!

And someday I dream of being able to purchase an IKEA Ektorp sofa and armchair. I just love them!