Thursday, November 15, 2018

A Room of One's Own - My Living Room Makeover


*This post is sponsored by Wayfair.ca. All opinions are authentic and my own. Thank you for supporting the awesome companies that partner with Woman in Real Life.

I'm fortunate to have a dedicated area for work in my home - a room of one's own, if you will. In actual fact, this room is a combination office and living room, but most of our family living is done in the kitchen and connected family room. People rarely sit in the living room. So I have taken that as an invitation to do what I choose with the space.

Last year, I redecorated the office side of the room. You can see my beautiful work desk in this home office makeover post. Recently, I decided that the living room side of the room could use a refresher too. Seeing as nobody but Ace the dog really uses the sofa, I felt we didn't need a sofa that was quite so heavy looking. Here's the before:


I was also conscious of the fact that we could use this couch elsewhere. Well, the cover anyway. It's kind of a long story, but we have two of these couches from several years back, one with this white cover and one with a beige cover. Now that we refreshed our bedroom, the beige couch looks really out of place up there. So we have now moved this white cover to the loveseat in our bedroom, and visually it makes more sense in the room. This couch, above, now has the beige cover on it and we've moved it to the family room where it looks terrible but makes the room so much more comfy (with two couches for the whole gang, including two dogs). I guess that means we'll be redecorating the family room next!


With all of our room makeovers over the last two years, my goal has been to create more sophisticated, elegant spaces for our family, keeping in mind that our kids are now teenagers and not small children. I'm not one to stick completely to one colour scheme, but black and white and grey are the unifying base colours between the different downstairs rooms that we've made over so far. We painted the main hallway and the dining room in white and greys and accented with teal. The office/living room already had white walls, with some black and white furniture, a cream-coloured area rug and pink accents. I wasn't looking to change that, so I sought a loveseat that would coordinate with it.

Sometimes all it takes is one new piece of furniture in the room to make a dramatic change. For this room, it was this gorgeous black velvet loveseat from Wayfair Canada. It's the Holderman Chesterfield Loveseat by Zipcode Design and it comes in several colours, including a pretty teal. I couldn't resist the black velvet though. I think it adds a luxurious feel to the room. It's quite a petite sofa, but as I said, we don't use this room for lounging. This loveseat makes a great place to work with a laptop when I get tired of the desk chair.


Of course, that first change you make in a room tends to inspire more change. To begin with, it inspired a good clean-up. If you follow my Instagram stories, you'll know that I spent quite a bit of time removing everything from the bookshelves, dusting and cleaning them and paring things down so the shelves wouldn't be so full. Not an easy task for me, because I really like to hoard books! I also moved the bookshelves closer to the couch and gave the areas of the floor that aren't usually exposed a good cleaning.


In styling the bookshelves, I still used quite a few books. That is the purpose of these shelves after all. I have a lot of decorative knickknacks, so this gave me a good opportunity to peruse my collection and find display space for some favoured items. I always like to incorporate vintage touches in a room when possible. I have so many vintage items and I hate for them to be mostly stored away in the basement. As you can see, one shelf of the bookcase on the left is devoted to vintage books. In terms of the books overall, I organized them on shelves by different categories. One shelf holds inspirational and writing-related books. Another is cookbooks and healthy living guides. Another is poetry. There's a space for biographies and another for literary guides.



I moved a small rustic side table from the office end of the room to the living room end to hold magazines. I use a magazine app now to keep me from hoarding magazines, but I still have a couple of piles around the house. The ones on the top shelf are antique guides and vintage magazines. The bottom shelf holds Wish magazines (a Canadian magazine that has gone out of business).



Besides the new sofa, I mainly used furniture and accessories we already had, like my pink side table (a curbside find that I spray-painted) and the fantastic silver clock. The one exception is my new pale pink ottoman - all of the coffee tables and ottomans we had in the house were too large for this petite loveseat. This ottoman is a good size and the silver legs match the base of the floor lamp. I have a silver tray that I can put on top of it for reading materials.

Overall, this was an inexpensive room makeover. I always enjoy shopping my own house and moving furniture and accessories around to change things up. For this room, besides making it more elegant, I wanted to maintain a sense of fun and femininity. It's essentially my space, where I can feel free to use cheery pink accents as I wish. It's also a room that's intended to promote creativity and I think it does a good job. I feel inspired when I sit in here, and so far I've managed to keep the dogs off the sofa. I'll enjoy that while it lasts. 


How about you? Do you have a room or space of your own? Do you stick to a clear colour scheme in your home, or go crazy with colour?


My thanks to Wayfair.ca for inspiring my new space with their gorgeous home decor offerings.



50 comments:

  1. Gorgeous! I LOVE the pink side table - what an amazing find!

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    1. Thanks so much! I'm really happy you like it! :)

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  2. I am sooo jealous of your "room of your own". I dream of converting a part of our basement into a craft studio :D . Just have to contend with the mountain of toys. The room looks gorgeous and the perfect place to sit and let the creativity flow.

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    1. You definitely need your craft studio! Get the kids to take the toys to their bedrooms, haha. Thank you so much for your kind comments. :) xo

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  3. It looks great Jo, you have such great taste.

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  4. Well put together living room, nice personal designs

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  5. Everything looks really nice and neat.

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  6. It's great that you made the living room your own! The design of the clock is neat.

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  7. what a gorgeous clock & a cute owl pillow

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  8. I love this decorating style. Those owls are adorable!

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  9. Good job! It looks really lovely!

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  10. love the colours of white grey & pink... calm & refreshing

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  11. Wayfair can suck me in for too many hours with all of their wonderful stuff. Love that pink footstool/table.
    jan

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  12. Looks so comfortable, a room I could live in!

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  13. Wayfair has a lot of cool stuff.
    I am also a book hoarder.

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  14. I just adore your style! The little extras - the accessories - are key to making the space your own!

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  15. The pink accents really pull it all together. I would never have thought to do that, but it looks great!

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  16. Very nice, I don't have a room of my own but if I did I would look similar to your room as far colors go, I don't like dark colors for carpeting or color on my wall.

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  17. I love how you arranged the bookshelves!

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  18. Looks lovely, I stick to a neutral colour scheme and do not have a room of my own to redo.

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  19. I really love that flowered lamp, it makes it look very lively in there.

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  20. It is amazing what a few changes in a room can do not just to the decor aesthetics, but it changes our personal outlook.

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  21. I love the look and especially that gorgeous love seat!

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