Tuesday, December 4, 2012

The Family Room is Coming Together

We are starting to make some progress on our house. After 1.5 years I think it is begining to reflect our family. We find that we love it more as we continue to decorate, and work on home improvements. Our house is small, old and a bit quirky but it is perfect for us and the season of our lives we are in. We were lucky to start with a very well maintained and move in ready house. But it did start very bare. This room in particular had almost no furniture when we moved in. Here it is the day we moved in. This photo only shows one side of the room. However the rest of the room was empty. A few months later we added the couch (on clearance at West Elm), end table (Ikea), lamp (we had, from Pottery Barn), a book shelf with the stereo and speakers which you can kind of see here. But in the last couple of months this room has really come together. Here it is today:

One of the biggest improvements to this room is the framed "art" on the mantel. As you can see in the first picture there are horribly ugly vents directly above the fire place. This is a framed piece of silk fabric pulled from my grandmother's scrap fabric bin. The frame came from Ikea. The reds, oranges and purples in the fabric go wonderfully with our totally awesome southwestern chair that we inherited this year from my in laws. I love this chair. It is so comfortable and brings a lot of color and warmth into the room. Then we moved one of our yellow chairs from the living room to create more seating. And we bought a cheep basic coffee table.

We replaced our solid wood back door with this one that has a window. This adds so much more light to the space.
We're not sure about painting yet but we needed something to combat the plethora of white in this room so we put up a little mini gallery to offset the TV. These are prints we had, a wedding photo and a St. Vincent de Paul's find.
We got the TV off the floor with this basic TV stand that we also inherited from my in-laws (originally from Ikea). Margot's Tepee adds a quirky, charming quality and gives her a little space all her own.

And lastly we added this massive Ikea book shelf which I love. It takes up almost the entire back wall bringing a lot of color and texture as well as storage. And we filled the bottom row of cubbies with Margot's toys and books so she can easily access them.


There are still some things we'd like to do in this room. I'd love to replace the existing light fixtures with track lighting and possibly paint. We need to replace the molding around the back door. I think a rug would be nice in this room at some point. The coffee table and end table will be updated once we can decide and afford what we'd like. And the couch pillows need replaced with fabrics that tie the room together. The current ones were just ones we had. But overall I love this space. I think it's warm and inviting. One of my goals for our house but especially this room was for it to look like a kid lives here without looking like it had been taken over by baby gear. I think we've done that and I enjoy the personality that Margot and her toys bring to our home.


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