We Interrupt This Living Room...

..which is still in progress, and of which I'll show you pictures as soon as I'm done with everything.

However, I do need to show you two things:

1. I Got A New Loveseat

This is the Ikea SONGESAND loveseat, in "Nolhagen dark gray."  It was delivered on Sunday, and lemme tellya, I'd never put a couch together before. There were only 3 pieces, and I did it wrong twice, LOL.

It's so cute and small and comfy!  I love it!

2. Fabric & Rug Inbound

I also have some fabric for a pillow cover and wall hanging on the way to my house, as well as a new rug from Target.  I'm so excited, and impatient, that I made an Olioboard: 

Basically what it will look like when finished.  

Annual Sewing Room Refit

Do I really do this every December/January?  I do, don't I?  Weird.

Anyway, the gray and white that I did last year was boring the heck out of me.  This is a creative space.  Grayscale?  Really?  I have no idea.

Before (last year)

Beige linen curtain (love), fabric boxes on wall shelves,
white above, grey below with grey trim. 

Closet shelves.  Grey and white and grey and white. 

What has turned out to be an awesome fabric storage idea, 

What's happening now... 

Fabric bins moved into the newly-pink closet

Doors back on.  The curtain was always a pain in the rear;
I ended up taking it down, and then the closet was
just this great big gaping hole.  

Last week and over the weekend I did a LOT of painting, refinishing, spray-painting, and re-arranging.  I'm not quite done yet; but by way of a preview, the whole room is going in somewhat this direction:

made using Olioboard

Update soon!


.

One More Fireplace Tweak + A New Toy

I know I'm like, the LAST person on the planet to find Olioboard (okay, actually, I found it like a year ago, signed up, and then never used it), but I am obsessed with it the last two weeks!  Rather than designing boards from scratch, I've started by uploading pics of my own furniture, and creating boards based around my existing rooms, so that I can tweak them in the design board to see what's working together, what's not, how the colors are functioning, etc.  It's so much fun!




Pared down to basic elements, that's my living room.  Aside from the blue chair, which I COVET.  But anyway.   It seems so simple, but it took me like three days to get this to where I wanted it, and it's full of soooo many ideas - ideas for additions, subtractions, and little fixes...

• I'd been thinking about changing the wooden DVD shelves, but I wasn't sure whether to go with black, or larger shelves, or some other color scheme.  Black and gold has been on my mind a lot lately, but I hadn't even considered it.  Now I know exactly what to do with those shelves.  (And no, I'm not telling. Read the blog. :D )
• Part of my decor is now and always has been about the houseplants.  Every so often, between new acquisitions and deaths, things planticular get out of whack.  At the moment, I have almost no small plants to tuck into places.  I have several large ones, but none are HUGE and fluffy like I want, they're very vertical and stick-like (mostly by nature of the habit of the particular plant, though a couple of them are pretty near dead).  
• I haven't changed my mind about the fabric for the Day Sofa, but I DID decide to do something really cool to it that I hadn't considered before.  
• I'd taken the rug out of the living room to clean it, and then didn't put it back in, because it'd been raining, and the dogs, and the mud, etc.  I've decided to stop obsessing about a rug altogther.  I like how things work together without one.  I'm just a bare floor person.  
• While I didn't change the art over the fireplace, I did change the art over the fireplace. Wait...

Before:

Note the painting in the lower right corner, leaning behind the Buddha .  ("The Soul of a Rose" or "My Sweet Rose" by JW Waterhouse, which is one of my very favorite paintings ever).  

Other issues:  too much BS on the mantel (that wasn't intentional, I just stashed it all there when I painted that gold frame around the sheet mirror a few weeks ago).  

Also the mirror itself.  While I do like a darker, aged-bronze-i-er gold against these gray walls, this soft, champagne-gold is nooooot the right gold at ALL.  And while I love a mirror up here, this one is just too big. 

After: 

Muuuuch better.  Even for a night-time pic, which I keep swearing I'll stop doing.  (Not a photographer, you guys).  

"Rose" is now not only up off the floor and hanging on the wall, but twice the size it was, thanks to one of my other favorite websites, BlockPosters.com.   

I'm a big fan of leaning large art on top of things, but I opted to hang this one, to keep the fireplace separate from the wall above it.  It makes the fireplace look a bit squatty (it IS squatty), but I feel like now it's a more balanced wall, and less of a giant rectangle of stuff.  

(Again, the accessories on the mantel are just kinda shoved there until I have time to work on it; ditto the stuff on the floor, of which there is far too much in this shot).  

(Nope. Still haven't painted the living room ceilings. Or done anything about that random cord on the floor. Dont' look at those. WIP). 

All hail the internet:

    This post brought to you by: 

Olioboard, my newest favorite toy

Pinterest, my source for inspiration, beauty, and LULZ

                                     and

BlockPosters.com, without which there would be no art in my house.