The New Living Room Furniture Is In

So excited to share that our new living room furniture is in! This room has been continually evolving and a labor of love since we moved in and I can honestly say it's never looked or felt better. Our new furniture gives this room the punctuation mark it needed to feel more purposeful and finished. Before we get to it, let's do a quick roundup of our living room evolution!

Living Room Evolution

Right after we moved in and before we started painting ... the living room was a vision in wood and yellow. It's actually pretty hard to believe this is our house!

living room with wood trim, windows and yellow walls

In our very first round of interior painting, our favorite painter guy hit the walls and the upper crown molding with what has become our house's go-to creamy white paint, White Flour by Sherwin Williams.

living room with walls and crown molding painted white, f

The fireplace was next. I painted the surround with the same trim paint and used stick-on marble looking tiles to temporarily lighten up the look.

living room with fireplace painted and white marble stickers

Floating shelves were added to the fireplace wall to give it the feeling of built-in shelves.

living room with floating shelves around fireplace

In our second round of painting, we painted the bottom floor and window trim. This was one of the biggest and brightest feeling changes that made the room feel so much bigger.

living room with window trim painted white

The last of the original wood tone left the room when I swapped out the massive old ceiling fan for something clean and modern to blend in.

The stick-on tiles started to show their wear pretty quick on the fireplace surround, so I peeled them off and gave a 1-year review.

living room with fireplace stickers removed

Literally a year later, as I started planning for our new furniture I painted the granite surround with a chalk paint to brighten it back up and we purchased and mounted a new frame TV above the fireplace to create one central primary focal point to build the room layout around.

living room with mounted frame tv above painted fireplace

And now we're here... with a new living room arrangement!!

New Furniture Arrangement

Remember this from my blog post a couple months ago? I used the West Elm Room Designer visualization tool to help play with different furniture arrangements and pick out pieces that would fit to scale. With the help of the designer at our local store, I decided on colors and fabrics for upholstery and placed the order!

Living Room Rug

Waiting for the new furniture was the hardest part - I've never ordered custom furniture before. Since the beginning in this room, it seems that I've been working to strip away all the color to lighten and brighten it all up. But with the new furniture, I decided to anchor the room with a rug to start to warm it all back up. I found this rug at RugsDirect.com - it's 9'6" x 14' and colored "Antique Moss" so it has a little more green to it in person.

empty living room with new rug in center

Furniture Delivery Day

The most awesome part about furniture delivery day was that the delivery crew did all the hard work of unboxing and assembling on-site. They kept all the packaging outside and brought the pieces in themselves.

It only took them 30 minutes or so to get everything in and assembled! Talk about white glove delivery. Awesome guys!

New Furniture Reveal

Ok ok. I promised a furniture reveal - and here it is! I ordered two couches, two swivel chairs, a drink stand and the coffee table from West Elm. As anchor pieces I wanted to invest my money here and knew I'd add on additional furniture and accessories from more of my usual more inexpensive go-to stores. Like the little side table and lamp I grabbed at Target.

The couches are in a Basket Slub fabric called Dove, and the swivels are in a distressed velvet in Sand. The swivels are actually named "Cozy Swivel" and paired with the distressed velvet fabric, there is no truer name! They are super cozy!

The coffee table is a massive 50" diameter which helps both fill the space between everything and also be functional, not too far out of reach. It's a pretty textured wood tone adding some warmth back in here.

living room rug and coffee table leg detail

Living Room Toy Storage

The new furniture arrangement freed up some unexpected space so I moved the kids' toy basket shelf from our sunroom in next to the window. With some new baskets to conceal the mess, this corner was an extra storage zone I didn't see coming!

toy shelf with woven baskets and painting of cottage on wall

Throw Pillows

Ok, take a seat. It's time for some pillow talk. I had absolutely no idea how expensive throw pillows have gotten! What a racket! It's been a while since I've needed to buy a lot of them, and after deciding to get rid of the pillows we had thinking it'd be better to just start over and replace them, I learned that lesson the hard way. Everything I found that I liked online was more than I wanted to spend right now on pillows so I literally shopped around to every home store in town looking for options. I wanted to stretch my comfort zone a bit, and buy pillows that worked together complementing the rug and colors of the furniture, but didn't match each other, and I was really struggling to do that and be ok spending that much MORE money on this room. For pillows. Sheesh.

BUT, in a last ditch effort, I was at Walmart and thought I'd just look and see what they had - and was PLEASANTLY surprised to find some really pretty cute pillows with fun textures and a variety of complementary colors at a much better price! My only complaint is you can tell the inserts are not full enough to give a throw pillow the oomph it needs (inserts should be about 2" larger than the cover to accomplish that), but I made sure to buy pillows that only had zip on covers so that I can eventually replace the inserts. But for now, they will do.

6 throw pillows on the floor from Walmart

To round it out I found a few more at Target to add some more color and fuzz to the mix. I liked what the fringe and fur do to soften up all the hard edges of the couch.

three throw pillows on the floor from target

The "Final" Look

I say "final" because you all should know better by now that there's nothing final about me and my spaces! But I am thrilled to have this room feel exactly the way I think it was meant to.

living room with new furniture and pillows

It's also so shocking that with double the amount of furniture in here, it actually makes the room look twice as big! But being able to get twice as many friends and family in here is what it's all about.

low view of living room from behind chairs

I stole a few pillows out of our front room to round out our pillow hunt in here. That room is currently holding all the contents of our basement after the flood, so they're not being missed.

I originally envisioned the beverage table going between the two Cozy Swivels, but on carpet and in between two kids who sure love to "swivel" it's really not stable enough for a marble top table to stay standing. Works great on the far end of the sofa though for extra place setting.