Up on the Walls

Now that I'm home on leave with my little man, I'm finding that we're using the Living Room a lot more.  Thankfully we've spent some time fixing this space up.  We started with this:

Listing Photo

Immediately we got to work painting the walls a much lighter color to highlight the natural color of the wood, instead of making it look like the dated Golden Oak. But we still left a little to be desired with our old furniture and bad rug choice.  (We all make mistakes... don't judge.)

We finally got our act together with a beautiful Ethan Allen rug, new couch, ottoman, blue velvet wing back chairs and lamps.

  

 But if you recall, the other side of the room was a white, empty pallet.

It wasn't always like that, once upon a time we had the beautiful landscape painting that the colors of the room were based off of:

But that baby went boom- and somehow crashed to the floor and broke the frame while we were away from the house for a weekend.  We have ghosts.  Or maybe the Hubs rigged it- he always complained that the size of this photo was way too small for the room.

 But we got our hanging on and viola:

We started with a small, flat screen TV mounted on the wall.  In the past we've preferred not to have TV in the main living space, but with our only TV in the house downstairs, it just wasn't very convenient.   The compromise was a smaller TV with a low profile so that it isn't the main focus in the room, but its there to use when we want it.

I installed the TV myself a week or so before Boden made his big arrival.  I found this awesome product for only $23 that allows you to drill a hole through the wall behind the TV, and then run your wires behind the wall, down to the floor where you can plug it in.

  It even comes with a fish tape to help you guide the wires through the wall.  Genius.

But the super fun piece was this new picture the Hubs and I found at Home Goods.

  It's more than twice the height of our original picture, and 18" wider, so it does a much better job to fill the space of this huge wall.  

 I love the colors even more than our first one, and since this one is just a wrapped canvas, I don't have to worry about this frame mysteriously breaking and falling off the wall.  (I'm on to you Hubs, I'm just saying...)

So that's how just a few things on the walls brought the room from this:

 To this:

I love kicking my feet up in here, cuddling up with the little man and watching home improvement shows.  In fact, this morning I turned on the DIY Network and saw myself- our episode of Bath Crashers was on!  Its always good to watch it and remember how badly that bathroom started.  It makes me much happier about the way it all turned out.  Sure, we've had some bumps in the road, but at least there isn't carpet in there anymore.