Home Tour: Formal Living Room.

First up on the post-renovations home tour, I showed you our powder room.  Next up is the formal living room.  I also refer to this room as the "sitting room" because I tend to refer to our main TV room as the living room.  Regardless of what you call it, this room is currently my favorite room in the house for any number of reasons.

Just to set the stage here, when you are in the entry way, this room is directly to your right and the formal dining is to your left.  Since it's one of the very first things guests see when they come in, I wanted the room to make a statement.  I decided early on that I wanted to stretch my comfort zone a bit and go bold in this room.

This is a picture of the room from the real estate listing.  It may be bold in its own right for different reasons.  (Obviously, we have slightly different taste than the previous owners.)

We started with a blank slate (well, a yellow slate actually).  And here's how the room looks today.

One of the reasons why I love this room so much is because it came together so easily.  I didn't really have a vision for the room when I started (besides bold choices and mixed prints), which is different than I how normally decorate.  But for whatever reason, my lack of a plan totally worked in this room.

I knew right away I wanted jewel tones in the room.  Every time I considered something else, my mind went back to jewel tones.  Then one day, Justin and I were at High Fashion Home and they had furniture displayed in various mock-up rooms.  One of the rooms was fabulous with a deep teal color, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that was the perfect color for the space.  Thankfully, the employee knew what color it was (Benjamin Moore Stained Glass).  And that's how the wall color was chosen!

We had the Ethan Allen chairs that were in our old living room recovered in a neutral linen.  Since the walls are darker, I wanted the main furniture pieces to be lighter.  You can't tell from the pictures, but the chairs have a subtle pattern on them and tie in nicely with the couch, which is from Macy's.  I may recover the vintage ottomans (a craigslist find) at some point, but I am currently digging the rose pink.  I am also considering painting the lamps (a Homegoods find) that are sitting on the end tables (another craigslist find, blogged about here), but haven't been able to commit to a color quite yet.  In the meantime, the tan color is working just fine.  And see that awesome vintage brass pharmacy lamp?  I got 3 of them on craigslist for $25 total -- yes, all 3 for $25!  

The "brass" shelves are an Ikea hack that made its way around the blog world (i.e. the Vittsjo shelves spray painted gold).  It's probably not a great solution for something that's getting a lot of use, but these serve only one purpose: to look pretty.

The shelves hold all kinds of goodies.  Some highlights are my grandfather's books; Justin's grandfather's books; an antique print from a Paris trip; some other vintage finds, and of course, some Target gems.

It took us three tries, but we finally nailed the rug.  Surprisingly, this was really the only element in the room Justin had a strong opinion on.  He was definitely on board with the leopard, but he was pretty picky with the look of the leopard print.  Thankfully, he has excellent taste, and we found a carpet that we both loved and had them cut it to specific dimensions for the room.  It totally makes the room.

While I was taking pictures of the room, my two favorite helpers/modelers were assisting.

When we moved in, this room had no overhead lighting.  We added 4 recessed lights and a center fixture by Visual Comfort, which I have loved for a long time.  The overhead lighting makes such a huge difference in the space.

So, I think that's about it.  Did I miss anything?  One thing is for dang sure . . . this room has come along way from the floral couches it started with!  

Blueprint Surprise.

The realtor who sold us our home stopped by today to drop off a little surprise.  The previous (and original) owners found the original blueprints for the house and sent them to their realtor to give to us!  How nice of them to think to send them along for us to enjoy.  And the timing is ironic because we closed on our house almost exactly one year ago today. 

Of course, we've loved looking the plans and seeing the minor changes that they made between the blueprints vs. what was actually built.  I should really take better photos so you get a feel for the actual layout, but the point isn't the actual floorplan, but just that we have the blueprints!

Here's the first floor.  To get you oriented, the front door is on the right-hand side of the photo a little more than halfway down.   The formal living room (to the right of the front door as you walk in) was slated to have a tray ceiling, but for some reason that never happened (and no overhead lighting was ever installed either!).  The lack of lighting situation has since been remedied.    

This next one is the second floor.  With the 100+ degree temperatures we've been having the past few days, I really wish they actually installed the ceiling fan in the gameroom, rather than the hideous boob light they picked instead.  And it looks like the previous owners decided to add in built-ins to the fifth bedroom (and the plans don't mention anything about the wood paneling in that room either).  All very interesting.  Well, at least to us! 

And this is the landscape design for the house (in both the front and the back).  Evidently, there were 2 phases of the landscaping.  They were going to install an awesome covered porch with ceiling fans in "phase 2," but I guess they stopped after phase 1.  It's a total bummer because we've always talked about how awesome having a covered area in our backyard would be, but at least we can see where they thought about putting it (and get some idea for what the landscaping looked like when the house was first built).  We're total suckers for historical information like that.     

So kind of an amazing, totally unexpected one year house anniversary present, right?  

And thanks for your comments on the powder room.  I will be sharing our formal living room next week.  Spoiler alert: the formal living room may be my favorite room in the house.