Living Room Vision Board
When we moved into this house we had ZERO furniture. When we first got married, we moved into Damon’s college home. It was full of hand-me-downs and cheap college furniture -it served it’s purpose, but it wasn’t what we wanted to start out with in our brand new home. We ended up throwing most of it into the deal when we sold the place and gave the rest of it way. The only thing I kept were our rugs!
Starting with a completely blank slate was a fun idea… at first. Since we were on a fast-track with our build I had to order a lot of our furniture before the house was even framed up since, you know, supply chain…
I struggled with the living room. I could never find any good inspiration for it and just kept putting decisions for that room off. It eventually got to a point where I felt like I just needed to get SOMETHING ordered for the room and picked out a couch and a swivel chair that I thought would be good, neutral picks. For some reason I thought a white tweed fabric couch was a good idea (hey, we’ve all made bad decisions). We went and bought the leather recliner off of a local furniture store’s showroom floor because we needed another chair and I wanted to be sweet and get Damon a '“man chair”.
The furniture wasn’t terrible. It was just… boring? Traditional? Definitely not what I was going for with this space. I arranged and rearranged, tried new rugs, tried new perspectives, but just never loved the furniture. The room somehow always felt too dark, even with a white couch and a light tan chair. I also quickly got over worrying about keeping that couch clean, especially since we had just gotten a new (large) puppy.
From the beginning, Damon had said we should just buy a sectional, but we couldn’t really afford the type of sectional I was looking for since I was on a pretty tight budget when furnishing this house. At some point I decided to just accept the fact that the white couch was a mistake and that we needed to find a new option and start saving for it! We sold the (still brand new because we never sat on it) white sofa, and ordered a sectional. We’re keeping our swivel chair to put in our bedroom, and moving the chair from the bedroom out here.
Since we’ve moved in, (and after I had already bought all of the furniture) I’ve changed careers and now design for clients. Space planning is so important and using vision boards is a great way to see all of the components of a room together BEFORE you buy. Brooke with Nesting With Grace has a great post on vision boards here.
I wanted to do a better job in planning our purchases for the room this time so I put this vision board together. It was helpful to try different rugs and pieces of furniture together to see what worked best together.
We’re keeping our World Market Bookcase and coffee table, but swapping out our couch and recliner for the Harmony sectional from West Elm. I love that it’s oversized and super comfortable but has a more modern look. We also bought this beautiful Ida Console that has TONS of storage
The area next to the right of our fireplace has been empty since we moved in, and I’m planning on buying this Fern Storage cabinet from Anthropogie to store quilts and board games in. I’ll probably do some plants on top since it’s right in front of a window with a large piece of art.
I also love this rug from Boutique Rugs - I think it works with the brick tones in the fireplace without competing too much.