The time has finally arrived to do something about our living room which has somehow languished into a vortex of insipid personalityless gloom
Our living room.
Ok, so it’s not looking at its finest at the moment, there should be some bookshelves in the corner, but even with them there it all looks a little dull.
When we moved in there was some terrible feature wallpaper on the back wall and a red fireplace. I picked some wallpaper I still love which was put up about three years ago now when our ace decorators came and painted and papered over some rather special choices in various rooms of the house. (Upstairs there was a room painted red, yellow and orange with posters fully pasted to the wall - it was not easy to fix, the bright pink room I did manage to tone down myself with 4 coats of white emulsion!) My sister in law offered us some much needed bookshelves, which did live in the very empty corner and held most of the toys and all the dvds. Its those that have just been ousted in order for the step forward to occur (and have left behind a pile of toys that now comprise the resident window feature)
The curtains, which part of me really, really, loves are from my parents house. They were in the living room when I was a kid, and put into storage like all good curtains are when mum decided they were a bit dated and replaced them when I was about 16. These are curtains of the early 80s if you couldn’t guess from the oranges and browns. They’re comforting, but they’re really not my choice. The carpet was. It was bare boards with a rug as it is in the dining room, but Sally kept falling and bumping her heads so when she started walking we got this. I never thought I’d pick a grey carpet, but adulthood brings all sorts of odd surprises your way.
There was always a plan to get everything a bit more cohesive and pretty, but it kept not happening, we kept talking about building some shelves to fit the recess and replacing the free ones with slightly more usefully sized ones (massive shelves, lots of wasted space) but it didn’t happen. Then one evening I looked at the curtains, the lack of pictures on the walls, the cushions on the sofa that also came from my parents loft that never had a home, and suddenly the complete lack of us in any of it was clear. We spend hours in this room and it’s just a bit shit.
The initial designs for the bookshelves were drawn with one of Pip’s Christmas crayons on a scrap of paper. That is step one.
Step two is some kind of gallery wall.
Step three is the curtains and the cushions, but this will involve a lot of sewing hours and that can only be done in a holiday when the kids are at nursery and I’m not. (The last curtains I made were for Sally’s room when we were moving her in anticipation of the new baby, I was 7.5 months pregnant, it was not easy or fun, this time it’ll be bigger curtains but a smaller me, hurrah!) fabric hunting on the other hand can start.... right now!