the living room, phase one

The living room is about 95% finished.  I just brought all of our old stuff to the new house. Phase 2 will be the finishing touches and wee bits of decorating.

Its not a very big room, but its a cozy room and holds a decent amount of furniture.  Its oriented south-west-ish. I rarely have any idea of what direction anything is; when the Mister asks if he should drive east or west I usually tell him to turn left, however, I am guessing that the living room is south-west-ish because I can tell the dining room is oriented due west and has nuclear-strength sun in the afternoons and thus the living room is some sideways version of west. (Wait around for me to explain string theory!)  The living room has three large windows, so there is plenty of natural light without it pouring directly into the space or being in your eyes.  This house is a side-hall colonial built around 1910, so all the windows and doors have plenty of ornate molding and trim.

Please excuse the curtains being hung sort of in the middle of that beautiful ornate trim.  I have 84 inch curtains and to hang them above the molding would leave them a good foot short of the floor, like flood pants.  On a side note, the idiots who lived here previously hung ALL of their curtains FROM THE MOLDING.  If I had bought this house I'd be mighty annoyed, but as it is I just want to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick.  I am fairly positive they desecrated the molding like this because the molding is generally 49+ inches on each window, and thus to hang on either side of the window would have meant a more expensive 48-84 inch+ curtain rod.

The floors in the living and dining room are a laminate, but they actually look really nice, and mimic what would have been in the house when it was built.  They are also a pretty walnut color.  Its funny, the floors feel fine underfoot, they look pretty...the thing that made me realize they were laminate is that they don't feel like wood floors when I am sweeping the floor.  That is a very Princess and the Pea thing to say, isn't it.

The front door opens directly into the living room.  I am not a fan of this; I didn't like it in our previous house in South Jersey either.  I prefer a foyer.  And a coat closet.  This house has neither.  Cue sad violins.

I put an Expedit unit right inside the door for shoe and hat/scarf storage.  We got some unfinished bun feet from Home Depot, painted them white and put them on the bottom, because there is a big air grate in that corner. I would love to put wicker baskets in these cubbies, but I know my kids would destroy them, so I went with Martha Stewart fabric bins instead.  The top two cubbies could use a wicker basket for mail, and perhaps a pretty tchotchke.  The Expedit could be three inches shorter and three inches less deep so it actually fits into the corner, but whatever.

The antique secretary sits on top of another air grate.  I'd like to order some fretwork panels for this piece and replace the glass with mirrors. I'm also debating putting the old art wall on the staircase, but its a lot of holes to patch upon moving out.

You've already seen George and the tv wall.

The bookshelves were built at different times, and I painted the back of one a nice blue.  Unfortunately, the waxy white back of the other shelf does not take paint very well.  (The blue one is actually the unfinished cardboard back, not the white front side.)  The other night I took all the books off the shelf and attempted to paint the white side with Zinnser primer so I could paint it blue to match....and it beaded up and rolled off. So.....I guess I will be finding some posterboard and covering that with some kind of fabric or wallpaper? Eventually?  Its on the list of things to do.

I love an attractively styled bookcase, but I can predict that I will never have one.  I like books too much. As it is, I have moved about half the books downstairs to another bookshelf in the basement in order to put up a few tchotchkes.  I put anything that made us look remotely literate or well-read in the basement (see: all the Mister's books) and kept only stuff I love up here (see: romance novels, vampire lit and decorating magazines.)

This little corner needs some art.  My plan is to put up some silhouettes of the kids.

I built a sofa table out of a Lack shelf and some table legs.  Its the perfect length (72 inches, nearly the length of my sofa), and pretty skinny (just under 11 inches), but it was still too deep for the space.  I liked the way  it looked, I liked having lamps on it and a place to put a drink (the sofa actually butts up to the door on the one side), but pushing the sofa so far into the room made the room feel even smaller and bit cramped, so we took it back out.

Now its like this.  I'd like to find some plug in sconces for either side of the mirror so we don't have to use the overhead lighting all the time.

So! Punch list:
* fretwork panels and mirrored doors on antique secretary
*do something to the back of the bookshelves so they match
*art on stairwell
*silhouettes
*sconces over the sofa
*new bamboo blinds for the windows, instead of the icky venetian blinds that currently fall on my head when I use them now
*I have plans for a new coffee table, eventually.