Weekly Focus Room: Living Room

Since we don’t have a hall closet near the entryway, this bench and the hooks oftentimes acts as our “dumping grounds” when we walk in the front door.  It needed some tidying up and the picture on the bench needed to hung.

You can’t see it from the pictures, but the lampshades on either side of the couch are were cracked and needed to be replaced.  They were damaged when they were in storage while we lived with my grandmother in between our moves 2 years ago.  They have annoyed me the entire time.  There were also some paint touch ups in the corner that never happened before we moved in, but you can’t really see them in this picture either.

 I chose the living room for this most recent focus room because of some of the leftover projects that I was anxious to complete.  We spend a lot of time in this room and I guess the nesting in me was just ready to get some things done and marked off the project list!

I also caulked the baseboards in order to fill in the gap and painted them with some leftover paint.  You have to love old houses with walls that aren’t flush and wood that swells and contracts!

This is just another view of the area as you enter the front door.  Again, it’s not visible in the pictures, but I did finally get around to doing the second coat of paint up the stairway.  It looks so much better.  At some point, I’ll make the stairway a weekly focus room and work on it some more.

I did some basic cleaning, but wasn’t as thorough as I would have liked.  I dusted some of the room, but neglected the TV armoire which probably needed it the most.  Oops!  I was pleased with some of the progress, but was bummed I wasn’t able to tackle the TV armoire like I had hoped.  It’s a big project though and the timing just hasn’t worked out yet.  We’ll get to it eventually.

There is still a lot more I’d like to do in the living room.  The window in the front still needs a curtain and I’d like to do a gallery wall of family pictures too.  I’d also love to spruce up the area where the bench and hooks are located.  I’m thinking maybe add some paneling/bead board/board & batten wainscoting/etc. and then have hooks all around that little corner area so we have more places to hang coats and bags.  And I’ve also been dreaming of some sort of shoe storage solution that could be pulled out of the wall {since there is just dead space underneath the stairs}, but that is way over our heads and would cost and arm and a leg!  Baby steps…