The Living Room, Or the Room No One is Allowed In

Behold my newly found collage making skills. I am the master of the internets. Or at the very least, I learned some of the tools in Picasa. Man, was it easy! 

So the collage above and the picture below are what my inspirations for our formal living room are at the new house. I need at least two floor lamps due to no overhead lights in the entire room. This is a common theme among the living spaces in our house and it drives me crazy. I HATE a dark room.

The fabric is what I am actually using on a club chair and a love seat that will be used in one of the sitting areas in the room. It's a ginormous space and has taken a lot of shuffling of furniture to decide what the final layout will be.

I love the tufted ottoman, but I'm not sure that it's the most functional piece for our family. I just don't trust that drinks won't get spilled on it (by me, of course. I'm a spaz.) I also love the light, airy look this room has, but I quickly realized that unless I wanted to recover every piece of furniture annually, light beige fabric will not be the most dominant texture in our room. Kids and dogs (and a woman named Eileen...) are messy, y'all. And I wouldn't trade them in a heartbeat for a room like this.

So when we moved in to the new house, we opted not to paint most of it since we like the color palette the previous owners had chosen. We did repaint the foyer the same color to cover up the nail holes from the gallery wall and we completely redid the basement, but we wanted to focus on our furniture instead of paint for this space.

Here's the room before we moved in: 

The wall color is Palladium Blue by Benjamin Moore, and though you can't tell, is a nice, cool aqua color. We bought the rug seen above from the sellers primarily because I hate shopping for rugs. Nine times out of ten, when I buy one, I end up hating it. This one was neutral, fit the space, and they didn't want much for it. So there you have, used rug just for us!

We are still working on recovering my old red couch and a few chairs and a love seat to go in this space, but it's finally coming together. I need to find some floor lamps like the one above, but maybe in gold instead of bronze? We'll see. It's a work in progress, and hopefully it will come to completion sometime this year.

Did you guys grow up in a house with a room that you were never allowed to set foot in unless you wanted to risk incurring your mother's wrath? Ours was the formal living room at the front of our house. My mom still has the white couch she bought over 30 years ago for that room. And claims the screaming is what kept it so white all of these years. I can't wait for my children to have the same memories, ha ha!

Until next time, I'll be keeping that tradition alive and never letting anyone enter the living room. Cheers y'all!