New Living Room

Over the last while we have been making some changes to our living room as we decided that it was time to retire our sofas and redecorate a bit.   It’s still a work in progress but I do have some photos.   I figure I’ll do it the same as our dining room and show how it’s changed over the years.

This is what the living room looked like when we moved in 8 years ago.   It doesn’t LOOK as bad as it actually was.   We had gotten the sofa and chairs from a 2nd hand shop for about 150 guilders and they were really not that nice.   All we had to put anything on was this massive Lundia unit my husband had with him at collage, that he had since he was a child.   Now, Lundia is great quality but it just looked messy and bleh to me, I hated it.

In early 2002 we invested in some new sofas.   We got them on the cheap at a local shop called Leen Bakker (kinda like K-Mart or Zellers-ish).   We got one even cheaper because it was a floor model and the color had faded on the back because of the store lighting.

I also talked hubby into cutting down on the amount of Lundia and used it just for a TV stand.

If only we’d invested in a better camera at the time!  That was taken with one of the first digital cameras we had.  I think it was 1 megapixel.

By 2004 we had banished most of the Lundia out of the living room and invested in a new TV cabinet and matching end table (later a matching coffee table followed when I got sick of this one and the junk that accumulated on the lower shelf).    We also put some cheap carpet in, which was a very bad idea with 2 cats and a dog.  After a few years, regardless of how much it was vacuumed, the carpet was stained and filthy.   It also molded to show the shape of the tiles below as we were new to the carpet thing and that put it in for us didn’t advise us to put something under it.

The pink trim on everything and the horrid pink zigzag border was driving me crazy at this point too.

By 2006 our sofas were permanently covered.   The fabric was one of those rough woven kinds of fabrics that the hair stuck in and refused to come out, and I’d washed the pillow covers so many times trying that they were starting to pill quite badly and were changing color.  The carpet was also removed.

The pink trim was gone by this point and the walls had been de-papered and repainted.  It’s hard to see in these photos though.  At this stage I was beginning to get really sick of the sofas (and the cats) and I hated the cheap, shiney, plastic vertical blinds we had in the window.  If you even touched them they’d break and fall off.

We’d also had a bigger flat screen TV that was given to us as a gift from my parents for x-mas the previous year.

The only time I would ever really be happy with our living room was at Christmas.  Especially this past x-mas (2007) when we got a lovely new fireplace.   Even though I was still hating on the sofas (which look pretty good in the photo actually, but weren’t so nice in person) and those blinds.   Everything looks better at Christmas though, doesn’t it?

So that brings us to present day, August 2008.   We’ve since gotten rid of the sofas.  We tried to sell them, tried to give them to a 2nd hand place and ended up giving them away to some random person.   Can you believe a 2nd hand shop turned down the sofas cuz of some minor cat scratching?!   Even the Salvation Army wouldn’t come for them.   Seriously, how fussy can all these poor people be?  Anyway, getting off track…

We bought a new sofa from Ikea, which was one of their showroom models.  It was in AWESOME shape, like new really, and we got over 200 euros off.  We then bought a new chair and footstool to match.

There was only one problem, once we got it all home, it just didn’t fit with the other things we had in the house.

The shape of the sofa was entirely different to what we had previously and when we got home our big coffee table just didn’t fit it properly.  Also, the sofa was much longer than the other ones we had, so it wasn’t as easy to negotiate it into our living room as the other ones had been.

We were also trying to create some more space in the house, which was starting to become crowded.   I guess this is natural after having lived here for 8 years and accumulating things, and I’m sure my big turtle tanks don’t help.

This is when we decided to just change the living room completely.  New furniture, new coffee table and a new plasma TV!  We decided on the new TV so that it could be flat against a wall and we could take away the large TV cabinet.   It was really big and took up more space than we wanted our TV to take up now.     So we are retiring our wooden living room set into our storage room in case we want it in the future if we get a bigger house.

This is what our living room looks like now…

Our plama is currently sitting on our fireplace until we are 100% sure exactly where it will sit on that wall, then we will have it mounted.  The DVD player will then go onto our fireplace and I can move that little wooden dresser (which is Xander’s ‘tool box’).  Our turtle hatchling tank fits in nicely as well.   I’ve not put up any thing on the walls yet, except the cross stitch that was already there.  No point when we may be moving things slightly once the TV is mounted.

We put up new blinds which can keep the peeping eyes out from the old folks high rise across the road and new curtains to to match the dining room and keep the sun out.  Not that that’s been needed much this summer.

So, overall we are pleased with how the room is coming along.   We’ll probably change a few things here and there (like maybe some kind of little rug for under the coffee table) but otherwise this will do us for quite some time.

This is my favorite bit.  The best part of the whole living room makeover.  My little corner.

A comfy chair with a place to put my feet up and work on my cross stitches or quilts.  My laptop right next to me so I can keep track of whatever I’m downloading, chat with friends and wait for my mom to come online while she’s at work.

It’s important I think, to have your own special place in your home where you are comfortable and can do the things you enjoy.   This is mine.

My husband has one too, in our spare room with his huge table and all of his robot stuff where he can be as messy as he wants!

Ok that’s a lie, I still harp on him to tidy it up every now and then.   I can’t help it, it’s the wife in me… it’s like asking the wind not to blow.