One Room Challenge, Week 1: The living room

I am excited to be doing the One Room Challenge again!  This time around I will be decorating my living room (and actually finishing it, unlike my dining room).  Since we moved a few months ago, this room was a blank slate.  Although I am decorating an entire room, the budget is small and I am reusing a number of items from our previous house.  In fact, I am using mostly fabric and paint to redo the room, as nearly all of the furniture in the room is already owned.  Also, we are renting, so I am limited in some of the changes I can make.  

We started off with this:

As you can see in the above picture, we have an unfortunate medium brown wall to wall high-pile shag carpet.  A 12 x 12 rug is not in the budget, so aside from vacuuming it twice a day, I am pretending this neutral-but-ugly carpeting doesn't exist.  We have a fake cement fireplace that I can't paint or improve.  We also have twelve foot high windows.  If you'll notice to the far left of the above picture, what looks like the last window is actually a pass-through into the dining room, and the window up top is actually in the dining room.  Like this:

When we first moved in, this room stood empty for a bit, because we put our (barely one year old) stained, beat-up sofa in the playroom and thus didn't have a place to sit in here. We bought the Petrie sofa in charcoal from Crate and Barrel.  It was not a great buying experience, and took a very long time, but we kept the sofa anyway.  

This moodboard is...hmm, well, I don't have a ton of OH MY GOD THAT CHANDY/RUG/$4000 KNICK-KNACK IS AWESOME moments in this room. This is the room that you see when you walk in the front door, and we spend a lot of time in this room. Its a cozy, warm, comfy, lived-in room. Or it will be when I'm done. 

I am hunting for an ottoman (six weeks to find a piece of furniture the Mister and I have "discussed" for three years, no pressure!). I would really like a round, tufted leather ottoman, but my guess is that with my budget I am going to have to either thrift or make something or do without.  Otherwise, all of the furniture we already own.

The new curtains will be made out of the Ikea Gullan Blom fabric.  In a later post I'll tell you how I am not mathematically inclined and accidentally bought seventeen extra yards of fabric.

I am using navy fabric (and some greek key trim!) in a number of places around the room, including a slipcover for the Expedit that our TV sits on.

The budget does not cover a $500+ massive piece of art for over the fireplace, so I will be making one of my own.

Those are the major highlights of the room.  Can't wait to show you the projects I've been working on!

Updated: See Week 1 (moodboard), Week 2 (curtains), Week Three Part 1 (art options), andWeek 3, Part 2 (splatter painting), and Week Four (bookshelves).  

You can follow along with a whole bunch of other One Room Challenges as well.

Beth - Chinoiserie Chic

Lauren - The Cottage Mix

Sherry - Design Indulgence

Lindsay - Everything LEB

Barbara - Hodge:Podge

Kim - Kim Macumber Interiors

LisA - Lisa Mende Design

Tiffany - Living Savvy

Jessie - Mix & Chic

Linda - My Crafty Home Life 

Alison - My Little Happy Place

Danylle - Nana Moon

Nicole - Nicole Scott Designs

Julia - Pawleys Island Posh

Jennifer - The Pink Pagoda

Nancy - Powell Brower Home

Lindsay - The Pursuit of Style

Emily - Rue de Emily

Lindsay - Sadie + Stella