We’re making progress on the living room little by little. But, it’s coming along. The first thing we had to take care of was the furniture layout, which took us a while to settle on. That’s because two of the four walls in the room have doors on them and another has a bay window. Meaning, we’re left with only one full, uninterrupted wall to work with. To complicate things a little more, we have a wall heater that gets the space around it very hot when it’s in use. Plus, the room is longer than it is wide so it’s a bit narrow. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about this (I mean, in a perfect world I would change things around a bit) but I LOVE our apartment. I’m just going over the nuances of what we were working with.
About a month ago the couch was floating in the middle of the room with the TV across from it. You might notice that looks verrry similar to the pictures you see here. But, the problem at the time was all the CORDS! They were a mess and they were everywhere. Cords for phones, cords for computers, cords for lights. The list seriously goes on. I mean anything that needed power was in the middle of the room and all the outlets are on the edges of the room. It was driving me crazy and that’s what started our multi-weekend project of rearranging. We tried EVERY POSSIBLE LAYOUT. I’m serious when I say that every layout. I was sore after each weekend from moving our couch all around the apartment
The problem pieces were the couch and the TV. After rearranging our living room for days on end and trying different layouts we came to the conclusion that there is only one that works for the furniture we have. That is to have the couch floating in the middle of the room and have the TV directly across from it with the chairs in between and the desk behind. We thought long and hard about this. We tried arrangements where the TV was perpendicular to the couch, but decided we didn’t want to have to have our heads turned to watch TV. While we don’t watch that much of it and I would love get rid of it altogether someday, the reality is we use it on a regular basis and we needed it to be functional. The other problem was that furniture couldn’t go near the heater or it would likely be damaged, nor did we want to put anything in the bay window. We don’t want to block those babies!
Even though we tried every possibility and ended up where we started I feel better now that I’ve seen and ruled out the other options. With all the small quirks around the room (like the eyesore of a heater) nothing else felt quite right. It felt like we were calling attention the weird parts instead of drawing your eye away from them. But, the problem of the cords was still a big one for us (scratch that. For me). But, because of our new, large rug Xan was able to neatly run an extension cord and power strip under the rug where it’s covered by the couch so you can barely see it, but it feeds most of the cords in the space. It’s great!
This is one small step towards where I want the living room to be. The differences here are the new rug, the addition of some wall décor, and a layout that is slightly different than before. We still have a list of changes, improvements, and more furniture we’d like to add to the room. But, we’re trying to take our time with it and get only things that we really love and work for us. So, it will probably be a little while before I have another progress post. Until then, here it is!
