BEFORE

AFTER

Click on thumbnails to see larger, more detailed photos, obviously.

What did we do?

1. Upgraded furniture quality. Both our old and new stuff were craigslist.org finds, but the new stuff is much nicer and more comfortable, not to mention an amazing deal. Which is why we have the coffee and side tables. They are arguably too large for our space, but a sofa, a love seat, a coffee table and a side table, all that high-end in such great condition, for $400? I couldn’t pass that up. Of course, I negotiated the price down from the original ask considerably. (Matt: “You can just smell people’s desperation, can’t you?” Me: “I really can. Not sure if that’s good or bad.”)

2. Rearranged. I tried to fight this, because now our (to me) overly large TV set is visible from the front door. But we had a short wall, a long wall, and a sliding-door-covered wall, with larger furniture and not many options. I caved, and I’m pretty happy with it – I believe I selected shelving that allows the TV to blend in pretty well, and not stand out as too strong a focal point. And even if it is, we traded off for far more comfortable furniture with a pretty cozy conversation pit, that gets used in that way by us and our guests all the time.

3. Downsized. Previously, I had a much larger shelving unit and it was pretty full of our stuff. I cut my book collection in half, his DVD collection is about 60% sold off to SecondSpin.com, and I took a good hard look at the decorative pieces remaining, purging the things I don’t really love, or which are too old/worn to keep any longer. A file cabinet in our office was also purged, leaving me space to file away papers that had previously been stored in the old unit. His DVDs were previously housed in the black trunk that was formerly our coffee table – moving most of our media into flat storage boxes that are tucked beneath the new coffee table freed up that trunk space for other miscellaneous necessities – including his collection of car care stuff which was bizarrely stored in the living room unit, previously.

I could probably pare down the book collection more, but honestly? I think we need the weight near the bottom (that red storage box is full of the heaviest books) to keep the shevling unit stable.

Overall, we’re really, really happy with the change, and enjoying the snot out of our new living room.

P.S. Tomorrow I’m blogging for Fair Pay on Equal Pay Day. You should, too!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.