One of my goals for 2022 was to update the flooring throughout the house. Ever since we moved in, we’ve planned to rip up the carpet in the living room and playroom and put down a hardwood throughout the main floor. We were thinking this was the year to finally do it, but Justin and I have been talking lately about different financial goals and decided we need to switch gears and prioritize some other things at this time. So for now, the flooring stays!
I had been holding off on updating the living room until we did the flooring, but now that that is a further project, I want to at least do a phase one update to the space. First on the list: carpet cleaning! The carpet is in such bad shape with lots of stains, but since it’s here for a while longer, I want to get it looking as good as possible. We have carpet cleaners coming on Friday and then I’m going to start in on some other updates to this space!
Living Room
The living room has remained mostly untouched since we moved in 3 years ago. We plopped down furniture from our last house and have left it as is. It has been super functional for this stage in our life with young children at home, but it’s not exactly cute. In fact, this room is arguably the one we spend the most time in and yet it shows the least amount of personality (minus the child and dog, ha!)
Updating the flooring would make a huge impact here and eventually I want to get a different couch, but for now, I’m working with what we’ve got: carpet and a six-year-old sectional from Costco. I don’t want to add anything too precious because we still have several years of sticky toddler fingers and rambunctious couch jumping ahead of us, but I still think I can make the room functional AND beautiful for our family.
The two biggest things this room needs (besides flooring) are paint and lighting. I’ve gone back and forth on paint color – I really don’t want to do white but the room has such large openings and is very connected to the foyer and kitchen so continuing with white in here makes the most sense. I’m toying with the idea of a fun color on the ceiling though (and maybe planking?) so we’ll see. There is currently NO permanent lighting. The ceiling has a fan only and while we use two floor lamps, they are not sufficient for the scale of the room. I plan to have hardwired sconces above the couch and a large chandelier to match the scale of our high ceiling. These changes alone will make such a huge difference!
In addition to the carpet cleaning, I’m going to add a rug to the space to cozy it up. My throw pillows are showing a lot of wear and tear so I want to swap out the covers – I’m thinking a variety of earthy tones and subtle patterns. There is currently no artwork in the room but there are five large windows looking outside. I’m going to paint the windows black and update the window trim as I’ve been slowly doing in other rooms as we go. I feel like a gallery wall might add too much visual chaos and take away from the view so I’m planning to just hang curtains and add one large piece of artwork above the couch.
Because of the large cased openings leading into other rooms, I don’t have many different layout options and we pretty much have to have the TV on this small wall. It’s sitting on a buffet that was handed down to me from my grandparents; I painted it this bright green in our last house but it’s time for a new color. I would love to someday add a fireplace here (just a little gas insert with a pretty mantle) and mount the TV but for now I just plan to revamp what I’ve got.
Eventually I also want to exchange the smaller couch with two large comfy chairs and update the exterior door leading to the porch but I’m not sure if any of that will happen in this phase or not. I’m going to take my time finding just the right things so we’ll see when that happens. This room is not going to be a super fast turnaround but I’m excited for slow and intentional changes!
Playroom
The playroom is adjacent to the living room and has been a slow and steady process that is mostly updated.
I have been holding off on painting the wooden trim until the flooring was done, but since that’ll be a while now I’m going to go ahead and paint the trim. I also want to add a fun rug and then I’ll probably consider this room good for a while.
I’m excited to get started!
simplify the chaos 
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