Last week I shared on Instagram that we are kicking off a home project this month- updating our living room! I haven’t been the best about sharing home projects start to finish so trying to commit to sharing the before, our plans and then the after. With the rate furniture is being delivered these days the after may be quite a bit after ;), but either way I’m excited to share!
Our living room, or library as we’ve currently been calling it, is off of our kitchen and has built in shelving and a fireplace on one wall, windows on one wall, the entrance to our foyer and then a wall of floor to ceiling bookshelves. At first when we moved in I was committed to styling the shelves and tried to do that, but it felt like we were purchasing things just to fill in the shelves rather than being meaningful about it. Also with two young kids around we can’t really put much on the bottom shelves unless we wanted our kids getting into it. We toyed with the idea of adding doors to the bottom shelves similar to the built ins by our fireplace, but ultimately decided we wanted space for seating and with the other walls occupied taking down the floor to ceiling bookshelves seemed like the best bet.
Here are the before pictures- both with and without our furniture- and the design plan for what we are hoping to bring into the space!
As for our plans- removing the floor to ceiling shelves will give us room to add a sofa and a sideboard for additional storage for platters, china, other things we don’t frequently use, but take up precious kitchen cabinet space. We also are going to be adding swivel chairs so they can face the fireplace or face towards the sofa when we have visitors. We will be removing the grasscloth wallpaper (kind of hard to see in the photos) and planning on painting the walls gray. We also will be having our existing fireplace surround granite removed and replaced with a Carrara marble similar to what we have in our kitchen just right next door. Obviously the below isn’t to scale, but gives you an idea of what I’m thinking of decor wise!
What do you think of our plans? Are you interested in more home specific posts? Look forward to sharing an update… hopefully soon 🙂
xoxo, Jenna