living room rearranged

When we first moved in and I had a gazillion pieces of furniture, I put the tv on the only wall in the living room that wasn't a wall of windows.  That also happened to be conveniently where the cable outlet was located. Once I added in the second set of bookshelves, it became very tight.  There was just too much furniture in the room.  I played around with different ways of arranging the room, trying to keep the tv in the same place, but eventually I gave up and took a bunch of the furniture to a storage unit.  (You can see how the room looked before with all the furniture three inches apart here.)

To help with my layout dilemma, I called Kelly and Olive, sent them all of our measurements and asked them to give me some possible layouts, preferably keeping all the bookshelves, and keeping the sofa directly across from the tv.  They suggested this layout (and a few others, but we liked this one), and I have to say I'm really happy with it.

And now, the after:

You all noticed the new mythical Ikea Rand striped rug, right? I've been looking for this rug for three years.  I painted my own a few months ago, but this one is 8x11, unlike the tiny 4x6 one I painted. In fact, I took the painted one and put it in the room to see how it looked, and liked it so much that I decided to stop at Ikea to see if they had the bigger one, and lo and behold yes they did. And that was that.

This rearranging was inexpensive--I just moved around what I already had.  I bought three things for the room: 1) the rug, 2) a floor lamp for behind the mission chair since we took out the table lamps, and 3) 8 storage boxes for the Expedit, since we took off the slipcover. And voila, whole new room.

I'll be honest, although I LOVE how much more open and airy the room feels, the sofa is quite literally shoved up against the bookshelves, which obviously blocks the bottom shelves and the interior bookshelf doors. The room is only 12 x 11.  Obviously I wish the room were a wee bit bigger so that I could float the sofa in front of the shelves instead of right on top of them.  I made sure that the stuff stored behind those doors is not stuff we need on a daily basis.  Otherwise, I love how it looks and we are quite happy with the new arrangement.