The one with the...Living Room Reveal

I hadn't realized how behind we were on blog posting until the DIY Cherry Blossom wall art post, where I was talking about how the living room and the guest bedroom were the two rooms in the house where I've done the most "decorating."  For those of you who have been to our house this year, this is all old news.  But for those of you who haven't, it's new to you!  

Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures of the empty living room before we started, but basically it was a big empty room. Here's the same picture you saw in the bookcase post:

In case you're curious...this is what the living room looked like when we first saw the house:

After much planning to ensure that everything would fit into the room, everything got delivered and it actually works pretty well.  Here it is... the living room reveal:  

Hopefully you appreciate this picture because it took me about 400 takes to get the right lighting and settings on my DSLR to get it to look like this!  It even included the use of a ladder and a floor lamp on a chair.  (Special thanks to my brother-in-law and my friends Maggie and Christine for looking at hundreds of pictures and helping me figure out how to improve the shots).  One of these days (in my spare time when we're not doing projects) I'll really learn how to use my DSLR camera and take better pictures! 

Even with all that work to get a decent picture, the couch looks a little green in the picture above, but it's really a dark chocolate brown.  I think the name of the color is "mocha."  We had a really difficult time deciding on a wall color because we wanted something neutral and light since the furniture and the rug were already dark.  The trick was to find paint color that didn't clash with the hardwood floor and also would work well with the curtains.  As you can see in the pictures above, we inherited the curtains from the previous owners/tenants.  The same curtains and valance were in the dining room, which we took off because it just didn't work with the colors and furniture in there.   But the window in the living room is so large that we didn't want to have to put up brand new curtains.  Plus they are the nice pulley curtains that probably cost someone a lot of money to custom make, and they're not too horribly outdated-- so they got to stay! After sorting through probably about 30 different shades of paint, we settled on Martha Stewart's "Cappucino". 

And in this corner... weighing at A LOT... the baby grand piano! Isn't that the best Christmas present ever!? The art work on the walls surrounding the piano are actually made of dyed large leaves. I got them while on vacation in St. Lucia (Remember when I went on a girl's cruise for a week and when I got home Dave surprised me with the built in bookcase?)

Close up of the tray on top of the coffee table: 

Below is an up close picture of the bookcase. Because we both significantly downsized the year before we moved into the house, neither Dave nor I had many books. Although it sounds odd I didn't want the bookcase to be completely full of books anyway, so not having a lot of books wasn't a big deal. We did, however, take a trip to a used bookstore nearby to pick out some "pretty books" that would look good in the bookcase. Rather than just get books that looked good, I wanted the books to have some significance. So I went through the "Classics" section of the used bookstore and picked out books that I remembered reading while in high school (and actually liked). I also picked out some other books that I thought every household (that is somewhat cultured) should have-- like Shakespeare's plays! At first I had all these "pretty books" on one shelf, which looked nice. Then recently while Dave was out, I stayed home with Pluto and decided to reorganize the books by color, which took longer than I expected.

Many of the items in the bookcase are from our international travels this year.  The large blue and white plate in the center bottom shelf is handmade (and handcarried by me) from Turkey.  The little wooden figurine next to it is from Vietnam.  The small white camel and the framed embroidery were a gift from a group of people from Krygzstan that I met while in Turkey.  The two little kiwi birds above are souvenirs from New Zealand.  Behind the kiwi birds is a boomerang that we picked up in Australia.  And the abacus in the case on that same shelf is from China.  Luckily there is still space in the bookcase for other things when we do more travel and pick up more souvenirs worthy of being displayed!  Dave and I both agreed that we probably wouldn't be buying many more books in the near future, so some of those shelves will probably stay empty for a long time.   For now, I'll probably just rearrange the books once in a while to change it up a bit... I could reach back to my childhood when my sisters and I played "library" and attempt organizing the books using the dewey decimal system... but that would probably require too much brain power that I can't spare. For now, this will have to do. 

Well, that's it.  The grand reveal.  I promise it looks much better in person-- so come visit!  At least I got a good "artsy" picture of Pluto on his favorite rug!