Our New House :: The living room

This room is the first one we plan on having completed and lovely.  As you can tell, it still needs a lot of work.  We started with a space that was completely not livable - mostly because the floor was unfinished wood.  Back in the day, when they ran the 'sub floor', they used short runs of oak and didn't do anything to them.  When we bought this house, the previous owners had ripped up the old carpet to reveal the original subfloor.  Problem is, it's not really ok to live on an unfinished floor.  Especially with kids and dogs.  Leaving out the issue of scratching and denting, cleaning a raw floor is almost impossible.

So we painted it green.  We had to also paint the walls white because the dingy grey with smoker white trim wasn't really working for me.  We're still rocking that look in a few other rooms, but out here we went stark white.

We chose not to paint the fireplace.  I love the idea of the original stone fireplace - but turns out it's been painted once (very carefully to avoid the mortar) and can never be pristine grey.  So it will turn white with the next iteration.

Here's the new problem.  Furniture.  We have an assortment of hand-me-downs, collected pieces and yard sale finds all crammed into one room.  The good news is we mostly have the same scale of furniture.  It's the color coordinating that needs work.  

Here's the plan at this point.  

My handyman, Mr. Hedin, is building a console for the TV and books and all of the other junk we seem to gather in the living room and it will hang on the wall next to the fireplace.  

It will be all white - the same color as the wall - with brass handles.  

Inspiration...

The TV will hang on the wall above it.  Usually I detest TVs hanging out in the middle of the room, but as it becomes a more practical element of my daily life, I am learning to adjust to the idea.  And House Beautiful had some lovely looking rooms with big TVs.  If they can pull it off, so can I.  And we'll hang some art around it so it isn't just floating in space on the wall.  

House Beautiful

We are several weeks - at least - from this being completed.  Not to mention that the current furniture arrangement has some people in our house grinding their teeth.  We'll move some pieces soon and see what we can come up with that everyone agrees on.

I'll keep you updated!