Plaster & Disaster

With my dining room coming along, I am loving this part of my house more and more! However, all this progress is making the rooms next to it (the kitchen and living room) look worse in comparison. The kitchen is obviously in need of work and something I plan to take care of down the line, so that is to be expected.

However, my dislike of my living room decor isn’t expected, although it has been lingering and growing for some time. While I feel like the dining room shows my taste/decor quirks in the best light, I feel like the living room shows some of the ways that it can go wrong. I like everything in there but something just isn’t quite right.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time and haven’t been able to figure it out, so I figured it would be worth talking about here and getting all of your help deciding what is wrong! While I don’t plan on doing work on this room in the short term, knowing what isn’t working will help me plan.

Admittedly, the room isn’t done yet. At the very least I still need to cover the ducts, get a proper piece for under the window and to put the TV on, and replace the coffee table (which is a lone hold-over from my college apartment). However, I am pretty good at looking ahead, and I can tell that even when I do those things, I still won’t be in love with this room.

As I’ve been sitting in this room over the last few months, I’ve come up with a handful of ideas of what could be wrong:

The rug – while the shag rug is really comfortable, the white, blocky pattern isn’t in line with my style. I’d do better with a flat-weave, patterned rug like I have elsewhere in the house.
Too many rectangular, dark pieces – with the book case, coffee table, and couch, the room is too heavy.
Too many random pieces pushed up against the wall – I’ve got 9 different pieces (cabinet, console table, vertical bookcase, TV stand, shelf, bookcase, side table, couch, side table) all around the perimeter of the room.
Too many small pieces – most of the furniture is small and mismatched, making things look skittish and busy.
Only red, gray, and wood – unlike the dining room where I’ve got a wider variety of colors, there is mainly a lot of red and gray in here, with some dark wood furniture.
Too many finishes – I’ve got ORB, silver/chrome, gold, and brass in here, making it look unplanned.

I am not sure if it is some or all of these things are the problem, but they all suggest different solutions! For example, if there are too many small pieces, I may replace a bunch of them with a large built-in arrangement to hold the TV and provide storage along the perimeter. If there are too many dark, blocky pieces, I can get a round, light-colored coffee table for a big improvement.

So I would love to know your opinion! Let me know in the poll below what you think the issue is:

Thank you for your help! Let me know your advice on what I should do with this room in the comments. I can’t promise I’ll do anything about it anytime soon, but I will think about it and get to this room eventually!

(Updated to add: Thank you all for the thoughtful and helpful comments! At the time, things got crazy busy and I didn’t have time to respond to each, but I did read them all carefully and they’ve given me SO MUCH inspiration to think about fixing this room. Thank you!)

For our particular level of DIY skill and amount of free time, it is hard to take on major projects like knocking down walls or building decks all on our own — that’s when we tend to call in some professional help. However, we’re often itching to do something that is more involved, substantial, and challenging than a craft project. That sweet spot is furniture.

Today, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of our favorite furniture projects that we’ve showcased on this here blog over the last two years.

Naomi’s Picks

I don’t consider my woodworking or furniture building skills to be very advanced or developed, but these are definitely some of my favorite projects to work on! The piece I am most proud of is the box that I built for my recent bedroom makeover.

I needed something with unique dimensions to fit this particular space, and I am really happy with the final result. While the overall construction was straight forward, I got to try new things like using veneer edging and getting the opening for the hand-hold right.

For this same room, I transformed a pair of flat-packed side-tables from Home Depot into the perfect bedside tables that I was looking for.

In this project, the main challenge was figuring out how to install hanger bolts so that I could use the legs that I bought.

Finally, I’m still using my first foray into furniture building, a long console table to hold plants in my living room.

Man, that was a challenging project for me! But it worked out in the end. Now I’m itching to try another project!

Sage’s Picks

I bet you thought I would pick my coffee table, since I’m always going on about it. Well it is the piece of furniture that I’m proudest of building because it was such a stretch for me — but since I basically can’t shut up about it, I figured I’d pick some other projects that I tend to talk about less.

First up, the shoe storage I recently created in our entry/dining room/sun room:

It’s nothing fancy, but I created it out of a stacking brown cabinet that I bought off craigslist for $20 after being on the hunt for months, so I’m proud that I had the patience and vision to get the perfect piece out of what didn’t look all that appealing to begin with:

Next up, another piece that’s currently hanging out in my sun room: the library cart that I snagged from that high school we got to ransack before it was torn down. It didn’t look so hot when we encountered it sitting in a hallway and we actually passed it by a few times, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I finally rolled it out and shoved it into my car along with a lot of other stuff.

Painting it was easy, but the thing I love most is the wedge-shaped shelves I built so that plants can sit flat on it (since the shelves are sloped). I didn’t have a good spot for it for over a year and it had to hang out in our terrifying basement, but now it’s found the perfect home in our finished sunroom.

And lastly, one of my favorite projects of all time is one that maybe you wouldn’t normally consider furniture…but it’s a fairly substantial piece so I think it counts:

I built this leaning mirror a few years ago, and it’s still one of my favorite things about the bedroom. It was a fairly easy project that adds a nice dose of color to the bedroom, plus every time I look at it I think about how I built it the day after running my second marathon. That’s real commitment to DIY….

Joint Projects

For two people who live in different houses, we certainly have made an unnatural amount of furniture together! Of course no furniture post is complete without talking about that time someone shipped us a plastic cactus in the mail which we then turned into a side table, and which was then featured on Apartment Therapy. Yes, you read that right.

This blog has certainly made our lives more “interesting.”

We also collaborated on three furniture pieces that time that we were on reality TV, competing on Flea Market Flip.

We’re not sure if they’re out favorite creations ever, but they won us $5,000 so we’re definitely pretty fond of them.

There is also that time that we each transformed cabinets that we pillaged from a High School before it was torn down into furniture pieces that we actually wanted to have in our homes.

Sage’s has since even found a new home built into her amazing kitchen makeover, while Naomi has lazily kept hers right where it is as a pop of color in the ongoing dining room transformation. (Can you tell which one of us self-deprecating people wrote that sentence?)

So there you have it, some furniture projects we did — from painting, to reimagining in creative ways, to building from scratch. Is furniture the sweet spot for you like it is for us?