Living Room Reveal – Farm Houses can be Classy, Fun & Practical!

Farmhouse living room reveal! OMG you guys this room took me over 5 months to finish – UGH Finally though, we have arrived at the new living room. It probably seems strange and even silly but buying a new sofa meant something to me. Throughout the entire home almost every single piece of furniture here I’ve either inherited or I built. The few other pieces besides I picked up at either thrift stores or garage sales. I literally only have one “new” thing and its my dining room chairs which my mom bought for me as a gift MANY years ago!

I am a firm believer that buying new the majority of the time is callous when there is so much awesome stuff out there being thrown away. But this felt special for me.

A gift to myself.

Not something I inherited, not a thrift store item, not a compromise but something I got to pick out and buy just for myself.

Not having to fix it, or paint it, or build it, or make it work, but something that was just right.

I sent my old sofa, old coffee table and one of my end tables to my garage last June and then proceeded to live without a sofa for four months… I don’t spend much time using a couch (or doing anything inside really) in the summers but I will say that it was kind of miserable lol I had two chairs parked in here for all that time and, for real, it was barely a step up from sitting on the floor.

Everyone was like: Ta, for God’s sakes, why don’t you bring your sofa back inside!?
And I was like: NO, I HATE that old sofa, my ex picked it out, I’m getting myself something new!

I looked at living room couches on Amazon for months, keeping them saved in my shopping cart until I had the money saved up. It had to be a very specific size and color and I would have happily held out forever for the PERFECT piece.

If I was buying new then it was going to be exactly right!

I was going to wait and order it AFTER I had already repainted this room etc. (so I didn’t have so much to move out) but with Lodi (and doggo Annie) joining my life I broke down because couch cuddles are important.

One evening we brought it home and put it together.

Not to write a review on a sofa but I have to say its light, sturdy, easy to put together and very affordable. For the price: I am thrilled with it. Click here to check it out on Amazon.

(I totally celebrated and stunned my new boyfriend by not sitting on my new couch. NOPE. I jumped on it and I think he might have fallen in love with me a little bit in that moment lol)

I started on the journey of fixing the rooms of my main floor over two years ago now. The wood stove left SO MUCH smoke damage behind. With it gone I took it one room at a time, reclaiming my home, repainting and repairing everything as well as giving my wood floors some TLC too.

I started with my Laundry Room, moving on to my Entryway and Dining room and last I did a full remodel of my Kitchen. Winter ended and I stopped for the spring/summer/fall of 2019 until right now, picking the inside work back up again by completing my Living Room.

I carried the lovely yellow called Rise and Shine by Clark and Kensington from my little breakfast nook beside my kitchen throughout this room as well as right up the stairwell to my second floor master suite. At first it felt really Big Bird for my taste but now that its here I love how cheerful and light it is.

And I have a very narrow stairwell so it helped brighten that up too!

I only needed one end table for my new L shaped sofa but I still needed a coffee table so I stole that from my Indoor to Outdoor furniture project – all of which is no longer outdoor but also part of my garage’s big seating area.

I repainted it, upholstered it and I really love how it turned out! On top of it is a project I made out of an old window: a tray for setting drinks on etc.

With my painting out the entire room anyway I also went ahead and painted the fake rock on my chimney in the same bright white semi gloss I used on all of my ceilings and trim. I really hated it before and now I feel like I can live with it lol at least for now!

In the corner I retired one of my grandpa’s old ladders making it into a shelf and blanket rack. Years ago I had built the mantel beneath my tv to cover up the cords and I still love how that worked out.

My console table charging station remains one of the easiest most handy creations I have ever built. I literally use it every day and it cost me like $10 and all of half an hour to build. I gave it a little skirt and better support so it could stand on its own.

My “artwork” of hanging my Grandma’s quilt simply made sense to me and I think the upcycle of old windows on the back wall turned out really neat as well.

For those of you who have been following along or checked out my posts about my coffee table, ladder, rug or sofa table (or just take a gander at the first photos here) than you know that initially the furniture layout of this room was quite different.

I even made a point to mention how important that skirt on my sofa table was because it was the first thing that would be seen when people looked into the living room…

It just didn’t work for me.

The back corner felt like a big clutter of too much no matter what I did with it and I also was SO annoyed by the fact that the chair was in front of half of my doors that lead out to my deck.

With the new sofa I did not believe there was an alternative to the layout I started with but I found myself fiddling in my architecture program with the layout and realized that maybe, just maybe, we could change some things!

Lodi and I tackled it one night, moved everything around and couldn’t believe how much better the space worked! It was like we re-opened the living room back up to the rest of the house!

And now, basically for the first time ever, I can open both doors to my deck without having to move anything AND we didn’t have to nix a single piece of furniture to do it!

This is probably the room in the house that carries the most layers of visible living history.

Why is there a stained glass window here that looks out into my guest bedroom? Why does the pretty etched glass door here go out to a hallway?

This used to be the front of the home when it was first built in 1915. (That was the front door and front window facing the road.) Then the wrap around screened in porch was added ten years later literally covering the entire front and west side of the home. And then, a few decades after that, my grandparents’ enclosed half of the porch for their bedroom until I came along, many more decades later, and enclosed the rest of the porch and renovated the whole house.

It is AMAZING how many steps and years and changes create the charm and the uniqueness (also the weirdness!) in old homes.

I love it!

The stained glass window is original so it hit its 100th birthday back in 2015. It is not in the best of shape – if a stiff breeze were to hit it I would fear it collapsing. So, its a good thing its enclosed by climate controlled rooms now.

I painted the etched glass door with gloss black rustoleum to match my other doors, it needed it REALLY badly.

To get to the bathroom you have to step through the etched glass door and out into the converted screened in porch. Its nice because my main floor guest bedroom is there too so, when I do have guests, its like they have their own private bathroom out there with them.

My Grandparents had a big picture window where my glass french doors are. I actually added three glass doors all together, two in my kitchen and this double one here that all step out to my wrap around deck.

Its always so much fun in the spring time, when it finally officially warms up, to open all my french doors out to the deck.

My living space basically doubles!

My old living room (if you must see it click here) leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Was it fun, quaint and very Grandma? Yes, and I loved it for that one fact, but it was also so much of my ex husband’s choosing and neither of those things translated to ME at all.

Is it possible to respect a 100 year old farmhouse without going full Grandma?

I certainly hope so!

I’ve been living here for five years and this is the first time (in my opinion) that this room is actually “done”.

I got married, divorced, lost a wonderful dog and found the love of my life.

And it really did take all of that for me to uncover my own personal style as well as my own lifestyle. (I have a sneaking suspicion that it was probably the two years of me living alone single here before meeting Lodi that really did it…)

In those years I figured out how I live and how I want to live on a day to day basis and that has led me to how I am now designing the spaces. Because, let’s face it, no matter how pretty a space might be, if it doesn’t work for the people who are living in it then IT DOESN’T WORK.

The old living room was adorable but it wasn’t me.

I love this living room.

It is practical and cozy.

Many naps have been had here after long days as well as lots of doggo cuddles. The tufted coffee table pushed up into the sofa means we literally have a full size bed whenever the heck we feel like it which is pretty much all of time because – WHY NOT?

This room makes me feel happy and spoiled.

Its a room meant for movies and Nintendo and it has already seen countless hours of tears, laughter, love and dancing. Its a room that is in NO WAY pretentious. It is a room that says: Be yourself and relax. Which I think is exactly what a living room should do first and foremost:

It should support every aspect of just plain unabashed living and feeling, of being ourselves, recharging and chilling out.

But I also think this room still respects the age of this home and reflects the fact that she is, and always will be, a 1915 farm house.

I still have the photos I took right after we had emptied the house out after my Grandma’s passing in late 2013. Of course I wish I had taken more before I began the renovation but that’s just always the case isn’t it?

It took me a year and a half to renovate this home – I moved in in the summer of 2015. My ex and the wood stove he installed did SO MUCH damage to this place and so much of it sat unfinished until I finally threw him (and the wood stove) to the curb in late 2017.

It took me over two years but I actually accomplished it.

I fixed, renovated, remodeled, repainted, rethought and finished the main floor. I FINALLY feel like I did right by this old home.

The last room to complete was the living room and its not at all lost on me that when I first started seeing Lodi was when I first started work on this room. This space was the first time I’ve ever had a man who wanted to join me in the work, the planning and the excitement of making a beautiful space for us.

Having an actual partner is a pretty foreign concept to me but its a damn fine thing!

REFERENCES:

• Painting out the room/chimney
• Sofa Table Skirt (and how to build it)
• Build Storage Shelves out of an old Ladder
• Quilt Wall Hanging and Shelf
• Tufting the Coffee Table with Fabric
• Picking out the Are Rug
• Serving Tray out of an old Window
• Old Windows made into Artwork