One Room Challenge: Living Room Reveal

Here we are at long last! After over 2 months of effort, planning, and playing I am ready to reveal my living room! I have a lot of thoughts and reflections on this experience, but for today I’ll try to keep it mostly to photos.

For a very quick summary: At the beginning of October I committed to upgrading my living room to better reflect my aesthetic, as I was still working with a few hand-me-downs, primarily my red sofa, which was keeping me from really doing what I preferred in this space. The main thing I wanted to do was to make my sofa more neutral through reupholstering it myself and overall changing the tide in this room to be able to build our home in a more soulful, storied and intriguing way.

While there are a handful of things I did not get to for this moment, I am still so happy to see my home start to reflect who I am and make way for many more layers to come over the years.

Before

Whew! It is so helpful to look at these photos and see how far I’ve come. The main things I altered were:

-Reupholstered the sofa to a pale, warm, grey

-Replaced the rug with a wool 8x10

-Created a new lampshade for the table lamp

-Created 2 new shades for the wall sconces

-Created a new cover for the ceiling light

-Purchased new pillows for the sofa

-Extended the sconce cord covers

-Added vintage and artist made items throughout the space

-Made my own paper mâché vases

Now without further ado, let’s look at those after photos:

After

I love this view peeking through the hallway. You can really see the effort to have layers and open up this room for the soulful whimsy I imagined for this space.

While I had big dreams of replacing that Grasses print, I am perfectly happy with it in this new iteration while I take my time to source something truly ideal.

I still can’t believe that I actually reupholstered this thing myself. It was the first thing I tackled at the beginning of this project. I am so glad I gave this a try and didn’t try to purchase a replacement. The bones of this sofa are in great shape and now with a fabric I actually like, it should have many many more years left.

I am so happy with how this view came together. While not exactly groundbreaking, it still has several small special details that add the sweetness I wanted for this space.

And here is where I leave you! What an incredible journey it has been. I loved tackling new challenges each week and giving myself room to try things, even if they didn’t always work out. I’m hoping to jump back on here soon to give more details on this process, but in the meantime, thank you for following along!

See you next time,

-Aimee