Before & After: Living Room

This is what our living room looked like when we bought our house:

Yuck, right?  We immediately tore out all the dark heavy drapes and the carpet.  We installed a (I can't believe I'm about to admit to this!) vinyl wood-look floor on top of the concrete slab.  I typically avoid fake-wood floors, but this one is actually pretty impressive.  It's a commercial-grade floor, which means it's great with the abuse it gets all day from the dogs and it's good with moisture too, which is great when you have dogs that track in mud and also drool insane amounts of drool all over the floor.  PLUS the pattern of the grain actually matches the grain texture on the floor... imagine that.  (This is my complaint with most wood-look floors.  The grain rarely matches the texture, making it look even more fake.) 

Aside from the floors, we painted, and we added a dog door in the left side of the bookcase.  That's really it, but what a big difference.

Here's how it looks now:

This is definitely not a finished product, but you can see where we're going.

Things to do: 

1.  Do something about that big blank wall behind the sofa (see earlier post).

2.  Get rid of the hideous end tables.  I'm on the lookout for something cool to replace them with... but I refuse to pay full price.

3.  Get rid of the Ikea chair.  It's lived its life and it's time to move on.

4.  New sofa pillows.  These are stand-ins for the pillow the dog ate.

5.  Reupholster the sofa.  Will do this myself, hopefully, once my sewing and upholstery skills improve... a lot