Monday, January 30, 2012

The Living Room

I kept waiting to show updated (final?) photos of the living room until it was clean and tidy and looked like a magazine or proper blog photo. Then I remembered that we live here, I don't take high quality photos, and there is no energy for staging in our house. So here it is, as it usually is. 

This little corner is neither living room nor dining room; it's an in-betweener that we gained when we ditched the pier fireplace for the woodstove. We cozied up our hearth with that simple wool rug, and the kids gained a shelf on the bookcase, which I now think will be staying for quite some time. (The huge room divider/bookcase thing I was thinking about is on the outs. I'm fickle. I'm a Gemini.) We got ourselves a house-warming gift with our garage sale money; it's our version of a stereo. I love it. I was courting the Sonos system originally, but learned that our rural internet connection wasn't conducive. This Tivoli is swell though. We've got 2 iPod speakers in other rooms in the house, so it's altogether a vast improvement over our boom box, which had been our sole music provider since ever. Yet it's still not taking up all the space of a full on high-fi, with all those speaker wires for Cricket to destroy, and Darling to repair in all of his free time.

The kids' kitchen went into the basement for a hiatus from 1st floor play. The main goal had become spreading the food items as far and wide as possible and one day I had decided that I'd tripped over wooden food and tea kettles for the last time. Basement play is a complete free-for-all where we don't always have to clean up after ourselves, so the kitchen is fitting in better down there for now. Up here it is a couple pull-push toys, and 2 bins: 1 for music instruments and 1 for current favorites.



I showed you the rug when it arrived. It was an instant hit and the living room immediately saw 4x its normal traffic. The black chairs (shown via pinterest, above) went south a little before the undersized rug. We loved the look, but they were not remotely comfy. Nothing enticed anyone to sit there. And anytime I've seen them in some super styley photo (as above) they looked very cool and still unwelcoming. So they've been replaced by a fabulous Luna Chair (thank you thank you Gramma and Pap-pap!) and a mod slipper chair (thank you Craigslist!). Now, we sit, we read, we snack, we linger. It's cozy.

I showed you the pillows and blanket before. Although the blanket is temporarily hanging out here, the colors and scheme (circles) fits pretty well. I'm considering leaving it. The last shot is our computer cabinet, which just kind of lurks in the hallway, looking shyly on. I think a nice coat of orange gloss would help, Darling thinks otherwise.

There's the small matter of those track lights and adjusting their length, and the possibility of recovering that ottoman and perhaps slipper chair, (and the disagreement over painting the tech cabinet), but I'm thinking that the living room is just... about... finished.

Monday, January 16, 2012

In January

We've been playing it low key. Not too wordy, just some photo updates. We'll be back here to chat soon!








Tuesday, January 10, 2012

During the holidaze

Grand grand times had by all!