After a few months, I finally got back to organizing my scrapbook station in the living room. I was able to remove the green canvas bins like I wanted. I found some pink plastic containers and little glass bottles in my container bin in the attic and used them for embellishment organization.
I am very happy with the layout now and can get to everything easily.
Sometimes just a change of a frame on a piece of art makes it look completely different. I have a set of 4 seasonal fairy prints by fantasy artist David Delamare. I really didn’t like the gold frames, so after searching, I found brushed nickel paint. I took the pictures out of the frames, sanded down the frames to make sure the paint would stick, and then applied the spray paint outside.The pictures look so much better and different colors pop out now.
The gold ones may look better with the wall color (which is the same in both pictures), however, the walls will be painted soon and the frames will fit in perfectly then.
So I can be in the same room as my husband when I scrapbook (while I watch him play video games or while he does his own thing on his computer), I have my scrapbook stuff in the living room. Until it got organized on a shelving unit, it always got in the way. It still wasn’t visually appealing until recently when I used some boxes I was using and re-purposed them. The scrapbook area looks so much better. I still want to get rid of the big canvas bins on top but I need to either get more boxes or something. For now though, this works beautifully.
Before & After
It was time for some new lighting in the living room. The lights we had were really nice still, but I wanted to use them in one of the bedroom upstairs, so I researched to see what I liked and then see if I could find it locally. I did find the lights at 2 different stores and decided to get them at Target. They were pretty easy to put together. The harder part of getting the right wattage of CFL for the room. I didn’t want to be blinded, but I wanted the lights to light up the room. We have a ceiling fan with a light if we want garish bright overhead lighting. We have task lighting on our desks, so just a nice natural light would be good. After starting with the 150W equivalent, we ended up with the simple 40W equivalent CFL. We will be saving so much too with these new lights. Also, a neat added feature is these lights have 3 shelves for our speakers, a candle, and a few little items that usually go on an end table but now I can free up that space. The lamps turned out great!
I was visiting with friends this weekend and I mentioned painting my living room again. I started talking about what color the living room used to be and what it is now. While I was on my way home, I was thinking about the conversation and realized that I should start writing about all of the color changes of all my rooms. Most of the rooms in my house have been painted twice and some will soon be painted for a third time. I am not indecisive (well, not about interior design), I just like change. So, the previous living room color change that happened in January 2006 will start a string of posts to follow.
1st painting (Behr ShipSide) : 2nd painting (Behr Traditional/Oakwood)
Paint is one of the most inexpensive ways to give your room a completely different look. And if you don’t like it, just repaint.
My most recent construction project was building side tables to go beside our new couch. When I go out looking for furniture in our area, I just can never find much of what I am looking for design wise. Since I wasn’t able to find the type of tables I was looking for, I designed them after our desk “legs” that we bought from Ikea. We finally have real side tables and not some boxes or make shift table.
Once it starts to be nice outside again, I need to stain and polyacrylic the tables. Once I do, I will post new pictures.
Some material details about the side tables:
During my most recent trip to the Baltimore Area, I was able to go visit my favorite store in the world – Ikea! My purpose on this visit was to purchase a couch I had wanted for about 2 years now. While the color that I wanted had changed (due to the original color no longer available), my fondness for the Tylosand couch did not waver. Here is a picture of the couch in our living room.
The couch is a sectional and can be divided in the middle into 2 separate mini couches. It may look a little small in the picture, but it is 94″ long (7′ 10″). The color is a deep violet-red. As you can see with Veda on the back of the couch, our cats are fond of it too. Also, in the picture, you can see our little, inexpensive, storage ottomans that I found at Bed Bath & Beyond and maroon curtains from Hancock Fabrics.
One of the best things about Ikea furniture is on the wood does not come from intact natural forests, they apply the German E1 standard to wooden products, they apply the Finnish regulations to their textiles, and they do not permit the use of paints and varnishes containing formaldehyde additives. The German E1 standard for wooden products and Finnish regulations for textiles are currently the strictest within their field worldwide. This along with so many other reasons is why Ikea is my favorite store.
It is nice when a new piece of furniture really changes the look of a place. Not a couch or an entertainment center since a pretty big change is expected. This change came in the form of a Multimedia Cabinet that can hold DVDs, CDs and the like.
I haven’t really ever liked the look of exposed DVDs, but media cabinets are always so expensive unless of course you want to buy a cheap one which I really didn’t want to do. So, after saving up some money, we were able to buy the Leslie Dame Solid Oak 612CD Multimedia Cabinet in Honey Oak (CD-612-D). It is a dark wood color a little lighter than my preference but still has a really nice color to it. The cabinet’s base, door, sides, and top are very sturdy. I expected a solid piece of wood on the back, but the very thick board that is on the back gives it good stability. The description of where I bought it says it will hold 290DVDs, 612CDs, 170VHSs, or varied for the combination of your choosing. I haven’t actually counted all of our DVDs – all I know is that it fit all of ours and there is some room to spare – so that is always good. Below are some pictures of our previous DVD “cabinet” and our new cabinet inside and out.
One of the best parts was that it was already put together. I don’t mind putting things together, actually, I usually enjoy it, but when you buy something that is of good quality and it isn’t inexpensive, I believe it should come put together if it is of reasonable size to do so. When the cabinet arrived, all I had to do was cut at the bottom of the box, lift the box off of the top, and then take all of the packaging materials off of it. I have to comment on the packaging – it was extensive and well thought out. There were plastic corner protectors on the cabinet and around the Styrofoam so that there were 2 levels of protection for the cabinet’s corners – it was awesome. I really wish I would have taken a picture of the packaging. The shelving for the inside of the cabinet (which I have to add that you can place in many orientations with the numerous holes for the pegs), was packaged between the bars of protective Styrofoam so there were no wasted spaces. Please note that if you are going to use the cabinet for DVDs, you will have extra shelving, so find a nice place to put your extra shelving so if you ever decide to convert the cabinet to CDs, you will have the extra shelves to do so.
Hopefully, in addition to making our home more organized and less cluttered, this cabinet will give some piece of mind to my friends when the think about visiting to know that their kids will have fewer things to get into and it will be a little bit more of a safer environment. There is still work to be done… but progress is made with every step.
I like to vary what I put up on the walls of our home. I am going through a Japanese style phase right now. I had been using bamboo table runners on my dining room table and sideboard, but had recently replaced them with cloth ones. And, I found a bamboo pole out in our garage. So, I strung some jute through the table runners and tied it to the pole. I then found wooden curtain brackets and attached them to the wall in the best places determined by the length of the table runners and the bamboo pole. I placed the somewhat heavy pole and table runner hanging art on the brackets and it turned out really nice. With lighter wall paint, the wooden tapestry would have really stood out, but I really like it.
I have rearranged our living room again. This “obsession” with rearranging stems back to my early teen years and possibly earlier. After a while, I get tired of an arrangement. Luckily, I have a computer program that I can arrange furniture in before actually rearranging it. It drastically decreases the time it takes and prevents me from making mistakes thinking things will fit and they don’t. The program also gives me freedom to rearrange in ways I wouldn’t dare try for fear of having to move the furniture many, many times.
I tried something new this time. Last time I rearranged the furniture, we introduced two new desks into our living room. I designed the room so that we could see the TV from the desks with only slight movement. I realized that we need a little separation and so this time, I divided the room in half where the desks are on one side and the couch and TV are on the other. It is still a cohesive room with good flow from one area to another, and I feel as if I have given us some freedom from the TV too. We will see in time.
Room before rearranging : Room after rearranging.
