Living Room Before and “After”

Sharing a recent home decorating project.
Before:

North wall – a hodge podge of bookshelves stacked mostly two or three high – I thought someday I’d build floor to ceiling shelves, but wasn’t able to come up with the money for the project, so these were to fill in the gap in the meantime. Unfortunately, it just looked rather messy.
Great love seat that I found for $25 at a rummage sale and planned to reupholster. Cost of materials again along with indecision about fabric choices and fear of messing it up got in the way.

East wall. Just a very full room with a lot of furniture. The large expanse of navy blue behind the armoire is a quilted window covering.

South wall – clutter. Piano bench has a pretty needlepoint seat, but the support beneath it is broken so it’s very uncomfortable to sit on. See that tall skinny wooden thing between the violin cabinet and the door? That’s my Gramma’s folding screen with four silk panels that she and Grampa brought back from China. So special, but one of the panels managed to get torn I felt awful about it – and there’s no room for it anyway.

 

West wall – boring expanse, the beautiful big potbelly stove hopes to be restored and then take the place of the little one.
Sooooooo – how to help this room?
After:

North/Northeast – I started by paring down the bookshelves. One went to our bedroom to hold videos, another went to the kitchen along with all the cookbooks, and a few just moved to new places within the room. The many binders in which I stored my sheet music and Suzuki books were emptied and the music given a new home in the coffee table-esque stack of boxes. (My son made those out of pallets! They’re supposed to be crates for delivering arrows to the castle in the movie we’re making, but I’m borrowing them. The loveseat was able to find room between the bookshelves against the wall. I picked up two tablecloths which I’m using as a throw until I can finally reupholster both loveseat and chair. That left me with a large open space above the couch. We had a mirror that used to go on an antique dresser, so I got my sons to help me hang it. I’m not positive yet about what should go around it. I felt it needed something. But for now, there’s a neat looking clock and a little corbel pedestal for one of Micha’s beaded dragons.

East – We found another home for the armoire and generally reduced the clutteredness. I gave the piano bench a new seat, got the top of the piano almost completely cleared off, and cleared out some of the extra stuff. I also made lace valances for the windows.

 

And finally West – my favorite and the most dramatic change. I decided to paint an accent wall. (The kids thought it was just about the craziest thing they’d ever heard of – painting just one wall! LOL) My friend, Cathe suggested the color and it turned out to be just perfect. I kept looking at that right hand edge of the green. I didn’t want to move the bookshelves again, but it needed something. Finally I came up with the idea for the scalloped edge. I used a stencil – part of it anyway and marked it on the wall with pencil, then painted in the lines with a small brush.
I took apart Gramma’s Chinese screen and turned the panels into a trio of wall hangings. (The fourth, torn panel became a pair of throw pillows for the couch.)
So that’s it – although “After” is in quotation marks because there are of course things I still hope to do in this room (like the reupholstering). I really like the changes we were able to make so far.