Living Room Updates And Fall Decor

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!

Let's go to a party!

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Our Early Fall Garden

Today I'm happy to have a chance to share some photos of our garden that I took last week. My favorite time of year is fall, and I love the way the garden looks right before we have our first hard frost. It's a transitional time, when the days are still warm enough for the late summer flowers, but cool enough for the early fall ones, too. 

I tossed some seeds in the dirt next to my craft room window last summer and then forgot all about them. They didn't seem to mind being neglected, though, and now we have beautiful tall red and yellow sunflowers growing here against the house.

It's always a race against time now to see how many tomatoes will ripen before the first hard frost. Tomatoes are my favorite summer food, and oh how I'll miss them!

The berries that grow over our front gate trellis are so pretty in the fall and winter. We have a beautiful view of these from our dining room window.

We've always loved the idea and look of colorful Buddhist prayer flags. My husband brought me these as a sweet surprise one day last summer to hang between the shed and house.

The tall ornamental grasses have ripened and turned golden. We'll enjoy watching these waving in the cold winter wind all the way until next spring.

This grass is still nice and green, though. Have I mentioned how much we love our new sprinkler system? :) 

Our new rose bush crept up the shed trellis just a bit this summer. If it survives the winter, it should really take off next spring.

Our lavender was enormous this summer and is still going strong. We enjoyed having the blooms in the garden and decided not to harvest it this year.

I decided growing herbs in our sunny deck pots is the way to go. Carefree and pretty, this rosemary and thyme needed very little water and attention.

   

This snap dragon grew from a seed that must have lodged between the paving stones in front of the shed door and the shed wall. It gets squashed every time the door opens and gets no attention whatsoever, but every year it comes back to give us its pretty flowers. We love its spunkiness.

Chrysanthemums, more than any other flower, symbolize a fall garden to me. This is the first one I planted in our new yard after our old tree was cut down. It's blooming here behind the last of the summer blanket flowers. 

   

After our first hard frost, we'll be out in our jackets and boots under the falling leaves, cutting all the summer flowers back and putting the garden to sleep for the winter. Until then, we're enjoying every single day of our early fall garden and the last of the summer flowers.

Thanks for visiting and taking a look around our garden today. I hope you have a wonderful week!

I'm sharing our fall garden today with 

Elizabeth & Co. September Garden Party

Creative Country Mom's Vintage Home & Garden

Fishtail Cottage

My Fall Wreath

Happy first day of fall, everyone!

I wanted to celebrate the first day of fall this year with a new wreath for our front door, so when my friend, Sharon, shared how she makes her beautiful wreaths for her famous Elizabeth & Co. tag sales, I knew I had to try making one.

Following her great insider tips and instructions, I bought all my supplies for 60% off at Michaels Crafts and spent about an hour hot gluing flowers, leaves, and acorns to my grapevine wreath.

It was so fun I made some for my daughters, too!

For a real treat, hop on over to the Elizabeth & Co. blog and check out Sharon's gorgeous wreaths, and you just might be inspired to make one, too. Thanks a bunch, Sharon!

Happy first day of fall!

Please join me at these fabulous parties!

Cozy Little House
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The Charm Of Home

  

My Hutch Over The Years

 I hope you're all having fun this last summer weekend of 2014.

I was organizing some photos on my computer earlier today and came across some old ones of my hutch. I thought you might like to see what it looked like before I painted it, and some different ways it's been decorated over the years.

  

This before photo really cracks me up! Can you believe all those pictures and frames! What was I thinking?! I had all my favorite photos of my husband and me, all my favorites of our daughters, and at least one of every extended family member. 

Wow!

My mother and father bought this Heywood-Wakefield maple hutch and the matching drop leaf table with four chairs for their first kitchen eating area after they were married. The blond midcentury Heywood-Wakefield furniture is very collectible and pricey, but this reproduction colonial style furniture that was manufactured in the 1940's, isn't. In fact, my google search found the same table and chairs to this set for sale for around $175, and I've seen it numerous times on Craigslist, too. 

It's not "collectible," but it's really good quality sturdy maple furniture. I never cared for the red maple finish and reproduction colonial style, and I had considered selling it many times. But I lived with it because it had been my mother's, and that tugged at my heartstrings every time I got really sick of it and almost gave up on it. 

It wasn't until I painted it and replaced the hardware that I began to love it. Painting black furniture is tricky. It's hard to get the paint smooth; almost like it has a nap, like fabric. Also, the second coat is like painting a shadow because you can't tell what's already been done, since it's so dark. This was the first furniture I ever painted (pre-chalk paint), and I cherish every little mistake. I've learned so much since this! (To see before and after photos of the painted matching maple table and chairs click here.) 

The photo above is my hutch a few years ago in summer. I'm still learning how to decorate my hutch. Some people just really have a knack for styling, and I've been pinning and studying other blogger's techniques. I think I'm still so afraid of overdoing it, like in my before photo, that I go a bit sparse sometimes. But I don't think you can go wrong by decorating with things that are meaningful to you and with things you personally find beautiful. After all, you're the one who has to see it everyday!

This was the first time I tried my hand at decorating my hutch for a holiday. It was so much fun, and I was hooked!

 This was Christmas two years ago. Most of these photos were taken before I learned to use a tripod. So, no, it's not your eyes, these previous photos are a bit blurry. :}

This is a photo I took last week of how my hutch has looked this summer. I love how the silver, white, black, and brown looks against the new softer wall color (BM Manchester Tan). The autumn sun is starting to shine through the west windows and make these silver trays glow in the evenings, so I think I'll leave them here when I start my fall decorating next week. I haven't a clue what to do yet, but I know I'll have fun.

   

I hope you enjoyed seeing my before and after hutch, and a little in-between. 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

It's a good day for a party!

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