Last week David posted pictures of him renovating the living room, and I've been dying to post pictures of the more or less finished product. However, we've been super busy and it has taken us awhile to pull it all together! At long last though, our living room is back in working order and feeling more like an "adult home" and less like a college apartment.
This is a view from the doorway to the hall. On the far left we have a basket full of dog toys and a snoopy dog bed, both of which Ash and Pepper absolutely adore. They use Snoopy's head as a pillow, and they strew the toys around the room daily. As I type this Pepper has his head in the basket pulling out his favorites. We hung a mirror that my dad gave me when I moved into my IL condo, as well as the rainbow fence picture my mom helped me pick out for my bedroom when I was under five years old. As much as we would love to upgrade from a futon to a couch for a fully finished look and maximum comfort, the futon is too valuable in our one bedroom apartment that sees many guests. We do have plans to replace the mattress though has it has flattened over the years, as well as buy a nice cover and some bolster pillows. To the right of the futon is what we think of as the reading corner, where we pooled all of our novels on a shelf. This is also where two of my african violets live and a brass bucket/pot from David's parents that we use to store our blankets. The coffee table is something I made while living in IL. It works for now, but eventually David has a dream of making a coffee table out of some engine parts he has.
During the renovation we replaced the brass/gold colored fan with a more modern one, and it looks much better than we expected after pulling it out of the box. We selected it online but were underwhelmed when we saw it in person. We've decided that it looks good enough for our needs and functions well, so we won't exchange it. This view of the living room is from the doorway going to the dining room, and shows off the two striped chairs we inherited from Tommy's old Vermont house as well as the oversized red chair that the dogs love to sit on so they can watch out the window. The blue rugs are wool and used to be in my brothers room when he was a kid. They were then passed on to my grandmother who had them in a bedroom, and she gave them to us after I commented on how much I liked them (there are a set of two). Eventually, we might like to upgrade to a larger area rug for a more cozy feel, but for now we like how these rugs work and look.
This is a view from the corner where the reading nook is, looking towards the dining room and kitchen. When we moved into this apartment we purchased the Samsung TV from Walmart at a discounted rate - it was a display item and did not come with a box. Like everything Samsung that we have owned, we love the TV. The TV stand was a gift from my mother to David for his birthday last year, but like many things in our house we found it on Craigslist. The speakers that you see on either side are part of a surround sound set that David has been collecting since I think high school (you can see the subwoofer in the previous picture, next to the red chair). For as long as we've been dating, he has been talking about how he couldn't wait to have it set up one day in his house. We finally do, and it sounds great! We did have to upgrade the receiver because the one he bought originally does not work correctly with HDMI cables. You can just barely see the Vermont coasters on the coffee table that we made and handed out as favors at our wedding - they are made of cross sections of birch branches, and have a VT logo branded in them.
Here is a close up at my attempt at making an organized frame area of sorts. I wanted a place to hang family photos, but I wanted it to look like a unit rather than just randomly placed along the wall. Here is a link to a blog post that shows the frame wall that served as my inspiration. I'm a little bit disappointed in how it turned out - the entire block is tilting a bit, some of the frames are too close together, and there are many messy mistake holes hidden behind the frame. While hanging pictures in this room David and I once again realized that it would have been smarter to replace the plaster in this room with drywall. It's a messy business to hang things up into walls containing lathe and plaster. Right now, the photos here are biased towards my family because I didn't want to hang empty frames and these happened to be the photos I had on hand. We plan to pick some of our favorite combined family photos and replace a few of these ones.
This art arrangement I absolutely love. The LAUGH and LOVE photograph sets were gifts from family and the two canvas prints were a gift from one of our wedding guests - he gave us a voucher and we were able to order prints of whatever we wanted. The pictures we used were taken by J. Harper Photography, our wedding photographer. The car is the Saab David restored in high school, and in the right hand picture you can see Ash peeking out the back window at us. It is probably one of our favorite pictures of Ash. And yes, we feel a little bit guilty that Pepper isn't represented here, but we don't have any professional photos of him and couldn't find one that we thought would look good on canvas. All in good time!
So that's our living room! We have a few small changes left to make, and have discussed ways to introduce temporary doors / curtains / barriers over the large pillared opening and the smaller doorway going into the hallway so that guests have a bit more privacy - kind of making it a pseudo-guest room. No solution has felt quite right yet as we don't want it to look too obvious on a daily basis and we don't want it to be too costly. If anyone has any suggestions, please share! We will post more updates as we continue to improve the living room with things like a new futon mattress.
Oh, and this past weekend the living room (and the rest of our house) was "put to the test" when we hosted a party in honor of Christine's one-year SJS anniversary. Twenty-five people attended our casual dinner party and the event was a success! As David said, it worked well because the living room, kitchen, and dining room each served as a "zone" for about 8 people, making it so that no one room felt too crowded. Our bedroom served as a fourth "dog zone", providing a temporary home for EIGHT dogs. Phew! It was fun though and David and I were excited to host our first official large dinner party, especially one with such special meaning for Christine.
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