Out With the Old

Have you ever put off a project in your home for entirely way to long for no good reason?  And then every time you walk into that room, that project is staring you in the face, taunting you?  That's where I was with my living room.  As I showed you in this post, I had a crazy amount of seating in my living room.  I'm talking enough seating for an entire basketball team.  And that was just way too much for my little apartment living room.

I tried to make it all work in this post, but even with all furniture flat on the ground (as opposed to upended...as the white couches were for a couple months) it just wasn't happening.

So why did I have so much seating?  Well it's a long story, but basically I originally had three couches and a much larger living room area.  Then I got rid of one of the couches, and got another couch and 2 arm chairs from a friend.  So then I was left with 3 couches and 2 size-able armchairs.  This all still worked in my old apartment, however, when we moved, it just wasn't going to happen.  I knew this, yet I didn't want to admit it.  I was convinced I could make it all work somehow.

The way we had all the furniture arranged had about a 1 foot space maximum between the coffee table and each of the couches/chairs.  This meant walking sideways wherever you needed to go in the living room.  This also meant me having to climb over the arm of the couch, like a true grown-up, to get on and off the couch.

This arrangement also made it so the white couches weren't even 100% usable.  Half of each couch was completely blocked by an armchair.

And having the two white couches flanking the TV just looked bad.  They were so low that they made the TV and it's shelves look like they were floating randomly in the middle of the wall.

So a year after moving in (yes a full year), I finally made peace with the fact that the 2 white IKEA couches had to go.  No one ever sat on them, and since I had originally gotten them off Craigslist, they had seen better days.  I had thought about selling the couches on Craigslist, but that only made them stick around longer while I never seemed to get around to putting them up for sale.  So finally, finally, enough was enough.  We got them out of the apartment, left them at our dump, and haven't looked back.  So without further ado, our brand new living room :)

We knew we wanted to bring the bookcases into the living room once the couches were gone.  This was for two reasons.  First, they anchored the TV a bit more since they're taller than the couches were.  And seeing them in place now, I personally think they kind of look like a very basic, college-apartment-version of wall built-ins.  But maybe that's just me.  Second, we had new plans for their previous home in the dining room, which I will share with you guys in another post, soon to come.

That area now really feels like a real, thought-out setup, rather than this is where are furniture fits, so this is where it will go.  We still have plans for the white cabinet in the middle.  We're going to drill a hole into the back of it, so we can store our router and all that good stuff inside the cabinets.  We will hopefully see less off all those lovely cords going on once we get that all finished up.

The thing I'm enjoying the most however, it all this extra space we found!  It literally feels like we have a whole new apartment.  We can actually walk around our living room with ease.  And there's the added bonus of not hitting our shins on the coffee table every. single. day.

We even have some completely unused space at the moment in one of the corners, which is a completely foreign concept to us at this point.

For now, we've made that corner Dakota's unofficial 'room'.  It stores her bin of toys, a dog bed and her bumpa-doodle, which is her favorite napping spot.  She was a little concerned at first when I moved all her stuff, but she's made herself right at home in that little corner, and seems to be loving it.

While we were moving furniture around, we also decided to plan out our lighting situation.  We previously had one floor lamp in between the dining room and living room, and one right next to our sliding door.  With no overhead lighting in the living room, this made our entrance area and half of the living room very dark.  So we took each lamp and put them on the outsides of the bookshelves.  So now there is no shortage of light in the living room.

Since we finally 'redid' our living room, so many more plans and ideas have popped into our heads.  The living room to-do list has now gone from one gigantic DO IT ALREADY item, to a ton of new ideas to improve the space even further.  One of these being decorating the wall space above the bookcases.

Since they're uneven, I want something slightly larger on the right side.  I may size them so each frame or piece of art ends equal with the TV.  I'm hoping this will add to the cohesiveness of this space, and really make it look like a defined unit.

Another biggy on the list is to add color!  I am in serious color withdrawal with the living areas of this apartment.  Neither the living room nor dining room has much in the way of color, and as you can tell from my bedroom, I'm a bright color kind of girl.  I think I've mentioned that my planned color palette for the living room includes bright corals, blues and yellows.  So I'm going to try and bring some of that in with art, throw pillows and decor items for the shelves and bookcases.

I will be sure to keep you updated on all the changes as they happen!  For now I'm just going to enjoy my nice, new spacious living room.  I think I love most the fact that I can just stand up from the couch and walk to wherever I need to go, instead of crawling over the arm or back of the couch.  It's the small things ;)

And now for one final before and after, just because I can't get enough of how much more space we have now!

So tell me what you guys think?  A million times better right?  Has anyone else put off doing something until it drives you absolutely crazy to look at it?  I know that's how things get done around here.  Or maybe making a single change in a room really changed the entire feel of the room.  I'll be writing another post really soon to show you guys what other changes have happened here since we moved everything around, I hope you'll come check it out!