furniture for living room

Gaining New Inspiration from Old Memories

 My favorite part of our old apartment was the mantle in the living room, pictured in the first photo.  It had all our knick knacks from our honeymoon and featured mementos from our wedding like dried flowers on either side of the mantle.  After moving into the new house, I wanted to create the same feeling on the new mantle.  However, after discovering an ugly cable jack behind the mirror that came with the house, our knick knacks found a new home on the built in bookshelf in the home office area.

I still wanted to have some of the same feeling tied into the living room area.  To re-create this, we hung up our wedding certificate in the additional seating area.  On either side of the mantle we have hung up pictures from our handfasting (a formal engagement ceremony) and wedding along with the appropriate flowers from each event.  I debated about painting the wall shelves white to match the trim of the mantle, but I opted for the brown look to match the photo frames.  Let me know in the comments section if you think I should paint them white to match the trim. 

Furniture for Living Room – Our Envision Chairs Have Arrived!

With most of the furniture in place in our living room, we were waiting for some living room furnishings to tie everything together through upholstery.  Using the mango fabric selection available from Sam Moore, our Envision chairs tie in the green from our dining room wall, the orange from our kitchen, the yellow from our living room, and the brown from our decorative elements like our wedding certificate. 

Pillows Can Make All the Difference

After deciding to get rid of our shabby college sofa, I had the perfect opportunity to get a very unique green sofa that I had my eyes on for months.  The Green Eyed Girl sofa from Carolina Girl Furniture comes with several pillows that immediately added to our living room décor.  Our living room looked more “complete” despite the fact that we still have blank walls and some empty spaces waiting to be filled with our Envision chairs.

Bringing Together the Whole House

It’s hard to believe that the months have flown by and Peter and Jess's house is coming together so well. It has been a great journey, and as we look at all the steps we took along the way, the latest one is the most impressive.

As we’ve mentioned before, when you begin decorating a house with an open floor plan, rooms flowing one-to-another, you can capture different layers of color that all work together to create an overall design theme.  When we started with Jess's house, we layered the wall paint so when you looked through the rooms, you could see where one room started and another room began by the change in the colors.  The office and living room are a warm yellow; we then went to a beautiful burnt orange in the kitchen which pulled out the colors in the counter tops and enhanced the cabinets. Next we changed to a sage green in the dining room area. All these colors were repeated when we added two gorgeous, large graphic print chairs from Envision Furniture—the Loretto chair with mango fabric (similar to the Collette from Sam Moore). And the focal point of the living room was a large, plush couch in a deep green hue that really punched up its unique fabric pattern. Now when you walk in, the combination of the textured couch, detailed and dramatic chairs and flowing layers of colors throughout the different rooms creates a distinct but collective look and feel for the entire house.

Updating our Furniture for Living Room

The last room downstairs to decorate, and perhaps the most challenging for us, is the living room.  With our open floor plan, it is the centralized location where everything comes together.  The terra cotta orange from the kitchen, the green accent wall in the dining room, and the yellow from the living room all need to work together in this shared space.  As we discovered when we moved in, this will be a bit of a challenge.

Turning a Basement into a Place for Family Connection

When my wife and I discovered she was expecting our second child, we realized we were nine months away from outgrowing our current home. Since we own a 3-bedroom home, and the newborn would be taking over the third bedroom, that meant we had one of two choices. We could either sell the house and find a larger one, or we could maximize the space we have and finish the unfinished basement of our house. While the first option may have been easier and more logical, we choose the latter. We soon met with a friend who is a local contractor to conjure up ideas about what we wanted.
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