The Living Room Rug (Insert Big Lebowski Joke Here)

Happy Monday! I hope you all had wonderful weekends! Even though it’s gray and rainy outside as I write this, I’m still riding high from a ridiculously fun weekend doing an overnight trail running relay with 1,000 other people and my incredible awesome 8-person team. Pictures can’t capture what it’s like to be out there on the mountain in the pitch blackness with nothing but a headlamp and the sound of your own breathing at 2am (omg, there’s an animal out there! oh no wait, that’s just the sound of my heart and lungs exploding). But here are a few moments from the daylight hours of the weekend:

ANYWAY, on to the DIY! Today I’m talking about some major changes in our living room. Just kidding, I’m actually talking about how we moved our rug by 1 foot. But it was an important foot, I promise.

When we first furnished our living room, we had everything focused in one corner:

But then we created a seating area on the other side of the living room to balance things out and make the TV seem like less of a focal point:

But something just wasn’t feeling quite right. It was lacking some kind of cohesiveness. I have plans to make some colorful throw pillows and a new coffee table plus I’m dreaming of a more colorful rug, but I started thinking maybe I needed to make some drastic changes to the layout of the room. And Naomi was all like “you can’t do that, this is the only way that makes sense!” and I was like “don’t tell me what I can and can’t do you’re not the boss of me!” and she was like “woah, calm down,” and I was like “you’re right, I’m sorry…oh wait, I think I just need to move the rug over a foot.” It was quite a conversation.

See, even though we had shifted the center of the seating area by adding new chairs along the front windows, we had kept the rug in the corner under the sectional. And that made the new chairs feel like a weird add-on, rather than an intentional part of the room.

Plus, it’s a major design no-no. As Emily Henderson tells us:

A rug in a living room should really ground the whole seating around – it tells everyone that THIS is where the conversation is, this is the focal point of the room…Your rug should be big enough for at least two legs of all your furniture to be on it, and ideally all four (but I know that is asking a lot). My rule has always been to keep it consistent – don’t have your sofa completely on it if your lounge chairs are totally off of it. Its better for them all to be distributed equally, visually.

(Read more of Emily’s genius about picking the right size rug and how to position it)

When Emily Henderson gives you design advice (or mandates), you don’t ignore them. I explained all this to Sam late last week, and even though Emily Henderson’s exhortations didn’t mean much to him, he’s gotten to the point of just going along with whatever decorating news I deliver to him. What a guy.

Then this morning (er, yesterday morning. Sunday morning. I never know: am I supposed to be pretending that I got up at 4am to write a post that publishes at 6am, or admit that I write them a day or two in advance and talk in the present tense? Blogging is so confusing.), as we lounged on the couch finishing bagels and talked about which parts of our bodies hurt most from our 24-hour trail running extravaganza, I announced: “We have to move the rug.” All he did was look at me, ask “Now?” and when I said yes, get up and start helping move the furniture around. Back off ladies, this one is mine. But he does have a brother.

20 minutes later, we had a repositioned rug. I wish it were a little wider so we could get more of the rug under both the couch and the lounge chairs, but I think it really does make a difference:

If/when we get a new rug I would love to get a 9×12 (this one is an 8×10) so that it goes even further under the legs of the furniture, and the coffee table I’m planning to make will be square so I think that will help make it feel even more like a single cohesive seating area. But in the meantime, I’m raising my white russian to this 20-minute project that’s really helped tie the room together (see what I did there?).

(Sharing at Tip Me Tuesday, Two Uses Tuesday, Remodelaholic, and One Project at a Time)