living room progress

I've been working on changing up our living room for the last few months. With the current crazy rental market in the Bay Area it doesn't look like we'll be moving any time soon, so I decided to try to make the best of the space we have and give it a little refresh. It's not quite finished yet, but I thought it might be interesting to share a bit of my process and a peak into the changes I've made so far. Read on to see the progress of our living room:


As a reminder, this is what it looked like before:

And here's how it is now:

We started by re-arranging all the furniture. The first step was finding a new spot for the couch. Moving the couch really opened up the space and made it feel much bigger. Our old, beat-up couch was too big and bulky, so we replaced it with the Karlstad from Ikea (read all about my couch search here). The new couch is almost as wide as our old one, but the slimmer style body and lack of huge rolled arms really freed up a lot of visual and physical space in the room. 

The bookshelf and TV joined the other bookshelf on the opposite wall, where the blue china cabinet used to be.

I love our new couch, but I have to be sure to give a special shout out to the replacement legs I ordered from Thirteen Colonies. I cannot emphasize enough how much they improved the look of this couch (these are the Danbury style in Mahogany finish). 

The other huge change we made was our new rug! I still love my floral Dash & Albert rug, but it was too small for the space once we re-arranged everything. We moved that rug to our office, and went with an 8x10' rug for the living room. I'll probably do a round-up of rug sources one of these days because I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at rugs. We ended up finding this gem on clearance at the Crate & Barrel outlet.

We moved my big, crazy Kilim chair in front of the window, and replaced our larger side tables with this smaller option from Target. Crap, it looks like I've inadvertently revealed my Target addiction, as I just realized the lamp and larger pillow are also from Target. I might have to start calling this the "Target Nook". The smaller pillow is from West Elm, though I'm still on the fence about keeping it (but there's proof that I do shop at other stores!). 

The china cabinet moved next to the couch, which works well to hide the extra door we don't use. I found the ottoman marked down to $5 at a thrift store, probably because it was badly covered in hideous floral upholstery. When I got it home, I ripped off the offending fabric, made sure the foam was OK, and then just used a staple gun to cover it in a base of plain muslin. I've got big plans to make a slipcover with some coral velvet I just bought, but that will probably take a while, so at least we've got the muslin for now. 

So here is my to-do list! I'm really happy with the big changes we've made so far, but I'm still tweaking things and searching for accessories. Fortunately, shopping for pillows and art is a lot more fun than testing out couches! I'm trying to take my time and sit with each new change for awhile before rushing to add something else. I want my home to continue to evolve over time and not just end up looking like a Target catalog. And maybe at some point I'll take down the Christmas lights, but I just love their pretty glow!

If you got this far, thank you for indulging me! I hope you enjoyed this peak at the progress of my home, and let me know what you think in the comments!