{Living Room} The Befores

My Living Room has been a revolving door of furniture and decor since moving into this house 6 years ago. It's slowly evolving, but now that Babygirl's Room is complete, I can focus more attention on completing it.

Let's start at the beginning. Here is how the room looked the day we put an offer on the house.



Look at my baby boy! 



You'd never know by the decor, but the previous owners were actually younger than us. I think like most of us, they started out with hand-me-down furniture and leftovers from college days. We're still trying to weed some of that out of our house now!

The first thing we did was paint the walls a brighter shade (Martha Stewart for Sherwin Williams 'Lamb'), and swap the carpeting for hardwoods (engineered). That really helped to lighten the room.

And with any new house, things don't quite fit together the way they did in your prior home. Talk about questionable taste a weird collection of things!




Can you spot the Eiffel Tower that is now Babygirl's Jewelry Stand?



I must have loved all things honey-wood, because I've got a lot of it. The room also had an outdoor rug for awhile, as buying a 9' x 12' rug was at the bottom of the list!

The Entrance Hall, connected to the Living Room, was awfully bland and devoid of personality too.

We changed that last year with a makeover.

The outdoor rug was eventually replaced by a jute rug, but I can't seem to find any pictures of that stage. Just more brown! Then I inherited the gorgeous rug that resides here now, along with some lighter chairs.

And was finally able to ditch the heaviest-coffee-table-known-to-man, with a glass top metallic table.

The mantel has also had multiple personalities.

My burlap vases were next.

Then the dried Fresh Magnolia Wreath.

And finally the Horchow "look-alike" mirror with black mantel.

Lamps were added to the console table (and a secretary over on the left!).

Then switched to these.



nice cords



With the addition of a wingback chair, I moved things around a bit more, and added new pillows and throws.

The sofa has settled in with some nice throw pillows.



And after nine-lives of decor, the coffee table is currently styled like this.




Definitely improved, but still willy-nilly. I'd like to bring more cohesiveness to the space, and rid the room of the remaining bad wood grain. Tomorrow I'll show you my plans and the projects. Do you have 'before' shots as humbling as mine?