The Living Room

Hello there, my lovelies.

I'm not going to lie - I starting drafting this post about a month ago, possibly even more. I'm pretty sure there's never a good time to come down with an unknown exhaustive condition (yup, still no diagnosis! But I've had enough blood taken to feed at least one small vampire family, so hopefully I'll have answers soon once all the tests come back...) but I can vouch for the fact that being knocked pretty much unable to do anything more than sleep, watch Wives With Knives (the new Snapped: Women Who Kill, you heard it here first), sleep, try to decide if eating will make randomly feel carsick and then sleep some more when you've just moved into your first house and you had Big Plans to decorate and write about that decorating is really bloody inconvenient. Wow, that was a long sentence. 

Anyway, this post isn't a personal pity party, it's a personal showing-off party, where I'm going to shove what may be my favourite room in the house at the moment (tied with our bedroom, I think...) all up in your grill. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... The Living Room:

Da-da-da-daaaa!

I LOVE IT.

This is a room designed pretty much entirely for a rainy November Sunday afternoon, around 3 PM, when the best thing you can possibly imagine doing is making a gigantic mug of tea/hot chocolate and curling up on the sofa with whatever semi-crappy Sunday afternoon film Channel 5 is playing, ideally The Mummy*

I love Sunday afternoons like this. Not every week necessarily, but Sundays for me are the ultimate recharge day. My ideal ones would probably include very little outside world contact and a lot of me-time.

But back to the living room. Aside from the above-described scenario, the biggest inspiration for this room was the fact it came with a wood burner, AKA the reason Alex wanted to buy the house. What screams (in a very gentle, comforting voice) 'cozy' more than a crackling fire and the perfect nap-inducing heat it provides? With that as my baseline, I threw my mind back to my brief obsession with Cruel Intentions - or, more specifically, Katherine's bedroom in Cruel Intentions (sidenote: the 90's/00's trend of adapting classics into teen films was a cinematic golden age and I need more angsty star-crossed teen tropes in my life.) A deep, dark blue room - when not occupied by a scheming semi-sociopathic cokehead version of Blair Waldorf - would be warm and nap-inducing AF, I decided.

Obviously, Pinterest has helped with this fantasy, because deeply blue-black rooms are pretty 'in' right now, like all of my decor choices because I guess I'm just really basic. Here are some of the rooms I'm trying to channel:

As well as the lovely deep, dark walls I think what all of these rooms have in common is a certain sort of Modern Victorian Eclectic vibe to the accesories and, especially, wall art, which is something I'm desperately trying to recreate in my own version.

Let's see a Before, shall we?

Pretty standard Victorian terrace fare: tall ceilings, big window, chimney breast, and - on three walls at least (why??) - the original moulding on the ceiling, which makes me incredibly happy. Oh, and wooden floors - AKA the reason I wanted to buy the house. We rented a floor sander a few weeks after we first moved in and had at the floors in here, the dining room and the bedroom (more on that in a future post! Probably! Let me know if you're at all interested!). I took this picture after we'd already done the floors (oops...), but before they were just a bit shinier and darker.


In retrospect, I kind of wish we'd painted the walls first, then sanded, then done the skirting board - only because having sanded and waxed the floors (with Ronseal Diamond floor wax) we were quite precious about them, and we've ended up spot-sanding and waxing any droplets of blue that have escaped the brushes (TIP: nail varnish remover also takes of accidental paint drips a treat without also taking up the finish underneath them). Not a big deal, but we could have saved ourselves a bit of time. Either way, we've ended up with lovely warm honey-coloured floor boards and I'm super happy with them. We went for wax over varnish because we wanted something that would show off the quality of the wood (the floor in here and the dining room were already exposed - as you can see - and in really good nick) and have a nice feel to it, and we definitely got that. 

Floor porn

The colour on the walls is Valspar's 'Night's Blue Arch', which not only has a fantastically dramatic name but is also gorgeous and a cheaper alternative to the Farrow & Ball 'Railings' that is the king of the deep blue drawing room. Pretty much every room in the house, save the kitchen, is getting painted in Valspar because they have a great range of colours and I enjoy their display in our local B&Q. I'm clearly susceptible to marketing. 

My only qualm with the paint was that in comparison to the other rooms we've done, the walls in here took f o r e v e r - but I'm pretty sure that that's just because darker paint needs that extra bit of time and attention. As you can see in the picture below, the first couple of coats went on pretty patchily, but the third was a dream and well worth the extra day's worth of scurrying up and down ladders and faningaling (technical term) around corners. 

Also, I spent a week picking blue out of various bodily crevices, so now I feel just that little bit closer to J-Law and her X Men experience. 




One of my favourite things about Valspar (not spon, but seriously hit me up I'm poor) is that you can get any shade in different finishes, so our shelving and cupboards in here can be a perfect match for the walls.

Which brings me nicely onto... the shelving.

Here's a before:

I don't mean to bad mouth the various previous owners in every post, because honestly they haven't done anything too insane (apart from wallpapering the bathroom, I stick by that rant!) - it's just largely not to my taste. Which is fine, because I'm sure whoever buys this house after we move, one day in the deep dark future, will want to burn down everything we've done and start again - that's the nature of owning a house. When it comes to the shelving option in the living room, the already existing built-in wasn't to my taste, or working for our purpose.

Here's the thing: I have a lot of books. I'm a prolific reader and, when it comes to books I love, a bit of a hoarder. I re-read - or plan to re-read - almost every book I've ever read, so I keep about 90% of the ones that come into my possession. Which means that when it comes to book storage, I need lots of it - and stat.

In our old flat, my book collection took up the majority of four little Billy bookcases which we had against the main wall in the living area, and since there was only so much we could do with the decor (i.e., we couldn't paint) I decided to go full Pinterest and organise them by colour so that they added some visual fun to our otherwise very bland white room. 

All of which is a long way to say, I ripped the old shelves out.


EIGHTEEN TIMES. EIGHTEEN blobs of glue. FOR OSB. THE LIGHTEST WOOD IN THE WORLD.

DID YOU RUN OUT OF NAILS? MY GOD!

Ok, so I guess I had one last anti-previous owners rant in me. But bloody hell. After spending several hours trying to pry the glue up (seriously, that stuff was not coming off - I tried brute force, glue dissolving fluid, nail varnish, animal sacrifices to the ancient gods - you name it!), you'd be pretty pissed off, too. 

In the end, we had to cover it up with another shelf, which works fine but is a tiny niggling annoyance to me because it just doesn't seem logical, to my brain, to add a base to shelves you've built on top of an exisiting unit, which is already serving as the base. 

Whew. 

After I had come to peace with Wood Glue Gate 2017, and finished painting the rest of the room, we got down to measuring for the new shelves.

TOP TIP: if your walls aren't straight (and chances are if they were built anytime before the 21st Century, they won't be), then you need to measure the width of the walls at the back and front of where your shelves will go.

Let me illustrate what I mean with some really high-tech graphics:



I mean, it may seem like common sense, but some people - naming no names here, but maybe us - might let that sort of logic slip their minds, and then have to re-cut all of the shelves.

I'm just trying to save you some pain.

During the whole shelf-building process, Alex declared that it was one the worst things I've ever made him do. And if that's true, all I have to say is...



Honestly? Worth it. The book cases look perfect. We measured them to make sure that, from the TV upwards, they're all at the same height so that it's almost perfectly symetrical on either side of the chimney breast. The TV fits snugly in the far corner (the cupboard on the right has a slightly bigger top, presumably designed to accomodate a television) and it doesn't feel like it's dominating the attention in the room without us having to do that ever so slightly pretentious (and, let's face it, inevitably mess-creating) thing of hiding it away behind cupboard doors or whatever. 

Come on, who's shutting those doors every damn night?

As you can see, I've stuck with my rainbow book theme. People always comment on it when they come in (usually positively) and it makes my slightly OCD and very visual mind incredibly happy to colour-coordinate. Also, despite the old adage I tend to at the very least remember books by their cover (if not judge them), so I actually find them easier to locate like this that trying to recall the author's surname or the title.

Some other details: the lampshade is IKEA, obviously, and the Treasure Island print was a gift from Alex a few Christmases ago. It fits right in with my literary wall, obviously, and at the moment it's the only piece of art on the walls in the living room because I haven't quite decided how the rest should be arranged yet.



We were really lucky that my manager was looking to get rid of this gorgoeus little 20's style leather Made.com sofa and it's armchair pal (currently in the sunroom) and got it for a song (thank you, C!)

The cushions (and pig) are a variety of presents and hand-me-downs, and the rug, footstool and side table are, of course, all IKEA. The side table and Eiffel Tower lamp (Next, I think, but a few years ago) were both originally bought for my bedroom at my parent's house and I sprayed them gold (of course) - the table in particular is good because it can be turned around and tucked under the sofa so that the top acts as a little table for laptops or dinners (although to be honest, we mainly use our knees. Still, choices are good!)

The footstool has a bit of a tale to it. We went to IKEA a few nights ago to get the rug (here - we could possibly have gone a little bigger, but I love that the graphic stripes add a bit of a fun twist, which is key as the wall colour could be a bit sombre otherwise. Also it's flatweave, which is good in a room where I regularly spill drinks and the dog will spend a fair amount of time) and spotted this little guy in Bargain Corner. We had been eyeing up his full-priced bretheran upstairs but didn't want to spend £55 on such a small piece at the moment, so we'd agreed to hold back and maybe buy something for the centre of the room in a couple of month's time.

And then. There he was, just chilling amongst the three-legged arm chairs and discontinued storage units. All grey and mid-century and almost perfect save for a few stains on the top. Oh, and the family (young couple and a toddler) also eyeing it up. 

"You could probably just power wash the top and it'd be alright," the IKEA employee told them

"Mmm, but are sure they'd come off?" the Mum and Dad wondered to each other, as if their progeny (who was cute, but inevitably sticky) wouldn't add stains the moment they got it home

"Alex. Keep watch," I whispered, from our station a few metres away. I could sense their weakness. The footstool would be mine. 

I pretended to be interested in a cabinet with a missing door and some chairs with torn cushions. Alex played idly with his phone. They continued to umm and ahh. And then, they wandered off.

We waited a few moments, of course, to be polite. We did a cursory turn of the aisle of unloved bookcases (all Billy) and rummaged half-heartedly in the bin of miscallaneous cushion covers. The family walked away. The stool was ours!

VICTORY. We paid £20, and got the stains off with a bit of Vanish (not a powerwasher) easily.

More IKEA finds - this industrial floor lamp provides lighting options and nods to both the modern and Victorian themes in the room

IKEA (also not spon, also please give me money I love you) had some velvet curtains in almost exactly the shade of our walls, which we paired with one of their sheer white blinds for privacy from the street while also letting maximum light in - a much nicer alternative to the vertical fabric blinds that were in every room when we moved in and which are the bane of my decorating life!

Can we please take a moment to appreciate my knobs? From Amazon

And there you are! One living room, mostly cooked. You may have noticed that you haven't seen the back wall, and that our seating options according to these pictures are not plentiful. Worry not, we have another sofa, I'm just doing a little project on it right now that I'm hoping to share with you very soon, and it isn't photo-ready at the moment.

Please, comment on this post, tell me what you like, what you'd like more of, link me to your rooms, give me some inspiration... just say hi! Whatever. And if you want to see more of the house, I'm much more prolific on Instagram, so click the links below and follow me there!