Does anyone else find it almost paralyzing to make decor changes in your home? I find it hard enough to keep the house picked up and clean, let alone spruce up the decor. Swapping out accessories here and there is one thing, but making major changes like painting and getting new furniture are things that pretty much only happen at our house when we have an event (like a graduation party) coming up. Which we do again this year. In about 4 weeks. Yikes!
I have a hard time defining my home decor style because it changes so fast, but right now this photo of Lauren Conrad’s living room represents pretty well what vibe I’d like to create in our home.
Image Source: MyDomain.com
Here are all of the things I love about this space:
- Bright, white walls
- Warm wood trim
- Caramel leather
- Potted plants with green foliage
- Round mirror
- Midcentury shapes (check out that planter by the fireplace!)
- Wicker/seagrass
- Graphic white and black fabrics
Then here are other things I wanted to incorporate:
- Beach art
- Sea glass
- Gold/brass accents
- Books
- Rustic wood mantle
Here’s what the living room looked like a few weeks ago:
We’ve been wanting to relegate this big, old olive green sofa to the basement for a while and replace it with something brighter. Also, as you can see our house is chock-full of that orange-y wood that was popular in the 1990s. I’d love to repaint all of the trim white, but ain’t nobody got time for that, so instead, I decided to just paint the fireplace white and replace it with a rustic wood mantle. Photos like this one inspired me:
Image Source: @HouseofJadeInteriors
Here’s what it looks like, along with this awesome live-edge round mirror I found at HomeGoods for $79.
Then I also bit the bullet and bought two Farlov chairs from IKEA in, gasp, WHITE. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “But you have boys. And dogs.” I read review after review of these slipcovered chairs saying that a little
OxiClean and a good wash gets these babies looking crisp and white again after life’s little mishaps. I sure hope those people were not exaggerating, because we seem to have a lot of little mishaps running around my house. I’ll be sure to do a follow-up post later on toward the end of summer letting you know the real deal on life with white slipcovers. And boys. And dogs.
Here are some of the “after” photos with the new chairs, which are incredibly comfortable, by the way.
And I love these two recycled glass vases from
Viva Terra. I’ve seen them for as much as $185 for the pair, but at the Viva Terra website you can get
this exact pair of vases for just $75!
Those
Aztec print pillows you see on the Farlov chairs and on the leather sofa are from Target. They’re normally $24.99, but at the time when I was writing this post (Wed, 4/18), they were on sale for $18.74! I already had one of these pillows from a year ago, but I bought two more.
And that cool
Midcentury plant stand with the white pot and wooden stilt legs on the left side of the sofa console table is from Target’s Project 62 collection ($29.99). It also comes in a
larger size, and they are available with black pots as well.
The art is a photo I took from beneath a pier at Topsail Beach in Surf City, North Carolina. I had it
printed on canvas and we’ve had it up on the wall for years. We have relatives in North Carolina, so we’ve been to this beach and under this pier many times. It’s great to have a little piece of the beach in the living room.
I love the look of a
big seagrass or jute basket to hold extra pillows (these are the pillows that came with the IKEA Farlov chairs). I had this one in our bedroom, but moved it to the living room.
To paint the fireplace white, I first primed it with some primer I had and then did two coats of Sherwin Williams Ultra White. We thought about taking the two wood supports down because the mantle can be hung “floating” style, but it would have required patching large holes in the fireplace surround and we weren’t up for that big of a job this go around. Someday I want to get a different fireplace surround altogether, but today is not that day. For now, I love how painting the surround white brightens up the room and lessens the impact of all of that orange-y wood trim.
All of the items on this midcentury side table (which I got at a Goodwill store for $15!) are items we already owned. The brass pineapple and brass planters were also thrifted items.
The two
geometric print area rugsย in the living room (because I couldn’t find a big enough area rug for the space that was in my budget) are from Target.
The IKEA Farlov chairs are nice and oversized, cushy but supportive, and they look FABULOUS!
I found this cute macrame wall hanging at a Kirkland’s store for $24.99. And that’s my fiddle leaf fig from Lowe’s. It’s doing really well in this spot of the room. I’ve heard they’re tricky, but so far so good!
I love how the white paint on the fireplace surround helps the carrara marble tiles stand out more. A project for another day will be to paint the gold strips on the fireplace black so they don’t stand out so much.
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BEFORE
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AFTER
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AFTER
All in all, I spent $1183.44 plus tax to do this mini-revamp:
If you take out the cost of the two chairs, the “decorating” total was just $385.44. We’ve been planning to replace that old sofa for about 3-4 years now, so I can almost not count the chairs in the cost of this quick mini makeover in preparation for our graduation party. But Dave Ramsey would count it, so I’m counting it too. Go, Dave!ย ๐
I saved a lot of money by “shopping” other rooms of our house for accessories we already owned that I could use in the living room makeover.
I’m happy with the way the room turned out! It’s a pretty dramatic difference, and it took the room from cluttered, shabby, and a bit dark to bright and interesting. I do think it resembles the style of LC’s living room at least a little. Thanks to Pinterest and Lauren Conrad for helping me figure out my current home dec style.
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