Fall has settled in beautifully here in Boise, and I'm loving the chill in the air!
I've been busy transitioning our living room from being cool for summer to cozy for autumn. This room hasn't been redecorated for about twenty years, and there have been lots of changes lately. I've shared a few in-between photos on my blog as I've been trying to work it out just the way I want it, and in a future post I'll share the fun old before photos. There are still a few things I want to change, like new lamps, but I can now say our living room is my favorite room in our home, and I'm excited to show it to you!
Our front door opens off our front porch right into one very long room, so we divided it up into an entryway and sitting area.
This is the entryway side.
Our hutch is in our entryway because the dining room is a tad too small for it. I store table linens and large serving pieces here, and since the dining room is just behind me, it's a convenient location. I also keep table linens in the dresser. I just might have too many table linens.
I had so much fun drawing my fall chalkboard following Lucy's (from Craftberry Bush) tutorial for how to draw pumpkins on eHow. I had to improvise using just a few chalk colors instead of pastels, but I was shocked how well it turned out. I'm definitely no artist, but Lucy's a really good teacher! I tucked a lamp into the tray with the pumpkins and flowers because I love to have a soft light on by the front door to welcome my husband home from work on cold dark evenings.
I didn't change too much on our hutch for fall, just added a few things I like.
My favorite thing was just sprinkling some acorns around the candles on this cake pedestal. Our candles are the faux candles that automatically come on the same time every evening for five hours. I just love these, and have them all around the room.
Across the entryway we use this narrow cupboard to divide the room and for much needed storage. My husband and I made it from two leftover wall cabinets after our kitchen was remodeled. We screwed two cabinets together and nailed a few boards on top that I stained and poly-ed. The bottom was painted with white homemade chalk paint and waxed. I keep all my silver, crystal, vases, and candles here and now that I have it, I don't know how I got along without it.
It's super fun to decorate the top for the seasons. I found this yellow vase at Home Goods while shopping with my daughter the other day. I love it madly. You wouldn't believe how heavy it is. My daughters are always good luck for me when I'm shopping. I needed a vase heavy enough to hold tall branches for every season, and I just knew I'd never find just the right thing for anywhere under $100. But there it was at Home Goods! Because my daughter was with me.
On the other side of the room is our seating area anchored by our new super plush and cushy area rug. I change my curtains for the seasons, so it dawned on me one day, why not change the rug, too? In the hot summer, I like having more of the hardwood floors showing, but in the cold fall and winter, I wanted a larger, thicker rug to warm things up. We found this one at Lowes and chose it because the colors are perfect for fall and winter and it's the thickest coziest rug I've ever felt.
This is our new custom made sofa from La-Z-Boy. I tried to choose a well-built, comfortable, neutral sofa, that will go with any kind of decorating I can throw at it. I went kind of crazy with cozy pillows and throws in all the fall colors I love. (If you haven't figured it out yet, cozy is my favorite fall word.) I bought two of these throws for the family room from Target last year, and they are so warm and soft and just the right size, that I went and bought three more for the living room. They're so cozy, we turn the heat down just so we can curl up under them. And they're only $14!
The square coffee table next to the sofa was my mother's. I ruined the beautiful top years ago while trying to strip the shellac for re-staining, so I ended up painting it black to match the hutch. I bought this little cast iron horse at the thrift store for $2. It's broken, and I think a child may have painted it, but I still love it. Isn't it funny, the things that capture our fancy?
Across from the sofa are two chairs and my graphic painted end table. It looks a little crowded over here in the photos, but this seating area is about the size of an average living room.
We call this chair our place holder. It's holding this place for the perfect chair we're hunting for. This is our front porch wicker chair, and every year when it gets cold, we happen to find a place inside where it's needed to fill a space. It's very handy that way. Have you seen the two wood and upholstered arm chairs in the living room of Fixer Upper's Magnolia Farms? That's the chair I want!
I love my cow from Antique Farmhouse. It's so heavy! I nailed three boards together, and my husband hung them from our plaster wall with a French cleat attached by three huge molly bolts. Then we hung the cow on the boards with a big nail. If it fell off the wall on your head, it would send you to the hospital, it's so heavy! So now hopefully it's not going to, and it's safe to sit beneath it in our place holding chair.
This wood compote was another thrift store purchase I painted and waxed. I've just started collecting white ironstone dishes. It has kind of become a passion!
This is my favorite thing in the living room, and in fact, maybe in the whole house. This is my (MY) new Simon Li leather reading chair and ottoman in a custom leather and color from Sofa Mart that took four months to make. I have dreamed about having a leather chair since I was about thirteen years old and started loving to curl up with a good book. It's the most comfortable chair in the universe, and the perfect spot for reading. And maybe for a bit of snoozing, too.
This long wall is hard for me to decorate and will take me awhile to get just right. We found this huge pine armoire at a consignment store last summer. I needed one more big piece of furniture to store my seasonal decor, and this is perfect. Next to it is an old military trunk. You can see from the next picture that I added an old window on top to give it more height under the big clock.
I filled my glass hurricane with green split peas, red kidney beans, and yellow corn from the bulk bins at the grocery store, a great easy fall decorating idea I found on Pinterest by Amanda Jane Brown.
I waited a long time for new living room furniture, and I'm over the moon happy with what we found so far. I'm loving how the neutral shades look with all my favorite fall colors, too.
Thank you so much for sharing it with me! You make it all more fun!
