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It’s nearly four years now since we moved to our current house. We are slowly but surely updating and decorating the rooms as we can afford to! The first was the kitchen diner, then the hall and most recently was the downstairs bathroom. I would love to do the living room soon, but in reality I think it might have to wait until the boys are a bit bigger. It doesn’t stop me dreaming though, and planning my perfect living room!
Our Current Living Room
We are very lucky to have a large living room. It is the entire width of the house and runs right across the back. We have a strange house though which is built into a hill. It has just one storey at the front but three at the back. You can see what I mean in this video tour of our house.
The living room has a small window to the side of the house and then a large sliding door which opens onto a balcony looking over the garden. At the moment we use one end of the room for sofas and TV watching and other end has all the boys’ toys as well as a table and chairs that they are currently using for school work.
The layout of the room is limited by having an electric fire in quite a large fireplace (which we never use) on one wall, and a large radiator on the opposite wall. In my perfect living room one of the first changes I would make would be to take out the fire and to replace the radiators (there’s another small one under the window) with new modern tall radiators. This would free up a lot more wall space giving us more flexibility in the layout.
Plans for a living room makeover
This would mean we could have one end of the room for lounging and watching TV and eventually (when the boys don’t need so much space for all their toys) the other end of the room could be filled with book shelves and a cosy chair to read in or drink your morning coffee while looking out over the garden.
In my perfect living room I would also replace our (stained) cream carpet with solid wood flooring. I love the look and feel of wooden flooring and it’s much easier to clean up spills which is vital with two kids in the house! I would actually run the wooden flooring through into the hall as well to improve the flow between the two areas.
High on the list of improvements would be decorating the walls. At the moment we have two cream walls, one peach wall and then a ‘feature’ wall with large flower print wallpaper – it’s definitely not to my taste!
I’ve seen lots of houses (mostly on Instagram) with dark blue or green walls and although I love the look I don’t think it would suit our large light room. I’d be more tempted to go for something like a pale grey. We have Dulux Polished Pebble in the hall and I really like it so that might be an option. We could then add colour with the soft furnishings and pictures on the walls.
Corner sofa dreams
Speaking of soft furnishings I really really want to replace our sofa. I bought it from IKEA back in 2004 when I bought my first flat! It is comfortable and I love it but the cushions are very worn, there are a few suspect stains under the cushions (I pretty sure one of them is chocolate but I’m not 100% sure!) and it has definitely seen better days.
I would love a big corner sofa, and perhaps one of those massive snuggler armchairs to go with it. Recently I found a company called Snug that delivers ‘a sofa in a box’ which you assemble at home – it’s one way to be sure you won’t have any problems getting your new sofa through the door! I love this navy velvet corner sofa but I think velvet is definitely something that will need to wait until the boys are quite a bit older!
Image credit: https://snugsofa.com/shop/modular
Lastly we would need to decide on some sort of TV stand / cabinet. We quite recently upgraded our TV to a big 55″ on and it’s currently sitting on a cheap IKEA stand in the corner of the room. I’m not a fan of TVs mounted high up on the wall because I don’t think they are very comfortable to watch when you have to look up to do it. With the space we will gain by removing the fireplace we could go for something custom made with cupboards and shelves to hide all the TV boxes and games consoles.
It might be a while before my dream living room becomes reality but I still love thinking about it and planning what I’ll do when the time comes. Do you already have your perfect living room or do you have things you’d like to change?
