A record of Upstairs Family Room, Four Weeks In

Last week we showed you how things landed in our kitchen, simply using the furniture and things that we already own. And this week we are sharing how it is looking upstairs. This is swiftly becoming one of our go-to rooms because it has windows on ALL FOUR SIDES. Not only does it get tons of strong light, but it also gives us views of the greenery outside at virtually every turn.

We knew we hoped this room to be a pleasant big shared family space that we could all spend plenty of time in together (instead of breaking it up into a bedroom/bathroom for us or two bedrooms/bathroom for the kids) and it has been working so well as a family room + workspace. We also did not enjoy the idea of the kids having to go upstairs or downstairs to get us in the middle of the night if they needed us, because that still happens sometimes, so us all sleeping on the same floor and having this excellent light filled space upstairs to spend time in during the day and into the evening has been strong.

See that big double window with the transom window above it in the photo above? That is perfectly centered in the room, and you can see that we created two distinct areas that are in short each half of the space (a living area on the right side, which is defined by that pleasant big area rug – and an office/art/work area on the left side of the room).

For context, that gray rug is 8 x 10′ and the sofa is a whopping 93″ inches long. So this room is BIG. I mean if you look at where the rug hits compared to that center spine of the window in the photo above, you can see that this area is literally simply shy of half of the room’s width!

We have heard from so many of you who live in smaller homes who have said “larger living areas and smaller sleeping spaces are strong in a smaller home because you share the larger spaces together, and simply go into the bedrooms to sleep, so it feels a lot more spacious to have the square footage in the shared rooms!” We totally agree already! It has been strong having one big shared space downstairs (more on that here) & this one upstairs – along with the large deck that we can all enjoy up here too (you can see more photos of the deck in this post about the exterior).

Let us swing back over to the left side of the space, which is essentially a work desk/homework area/art zone for the kids as well as a desk for us to work from when we want to use our big desktop monitor (our other computer is a laptop so we use that in any number of other spots like downstairs at the kitchen table or even upstairs on the deck).

Simply like in the kitchen, we have furnished and decorated it nearly entirely with things we already owned. The only new purchases are the chairs in the office area, a couple of storage baskets, and a new TV since we moved without one (we sold our wall-mounted TVs in Richmond with the house – more on what stayed behind in that house here & this podcast explains how we priced everything – aka, the exact amount of money we made selling all of those items with the house).

I will not go as far as to say things are 100% ideal for this space (more on that as we go) but everything fell into place remarkably well considering it was simply stuff that we shoved into the pod and hoped would work out for the best – and I am glad it does not put our feet to the fire to replace anything immediately.

The lounge-y half of the room looked like this back when we saw it in February:

And after things like a fresh coat of paint (SW Pure White), refinishing the floors, and plopping down our furniture, it looks like this today. It also helps not taking this photo on a rainy day with your iPhone.

You may recognize a lot of the furniture in these pictures, although many of these items have never occupied the same space before. The couch is from our old living room. The rug is from our son’s old bedroom. The white wall-mounted bookshelf is from our beach house living room. The bean bags are from our kids’ old art room (we will eventually get a proper coffee table but they are simply fine for now). We thought this room would take a lot of rearranging to get everything to playing nicely together, but everything fairly much stayed exactly where we put it down on those first few days of unpacking.

It was fairly natural to orient the seating area this way because this was the best place to hang the TV since, again, there are windows on all four sides of the room. This was in short the only wall with sufficient space for the TV to not overlap a window – and so far it has been strong. I realize it is not the most sophisticated decision to let a TV direct your furniture placement, but you already know we are not sophisticated. Especially if you know our TV viewing habits (The Circle, anyone?)

And yes, we did splurge to buy ourselves the Frame TV (hello blogger bandwagon!) since it will likely be our only television in the house. I am glad we got it, but I think overall I’d give it a B+. We enjoy how close it sits to the wall and that we could magnetically attach the beige “bezel” around it to make it look more like a light wood picture frame (that comes with the TV).

But I think the “art” screensaver looks better in pictures than it does in real life (that is a photo from our family’s Costa Rica trip earlier this year that we use as “art” when the TV is not on) so we leave ours powered off a lot with simply a plain ol’ black screen. Perhaps I will dive into things a little deeper in an upcoming podcast, but since we were on the topic I figured I’d throw out my two cents.

One other swift update that we did in here was to add a bottom shelf to that white console table (it had been in our old dining room but it had an open bottom). So after we put it up here under the TV, we simply cut a piece of plywood so it could rest across the lower supports, giving us a especially functional shelf instead of simply a boxed off base that had zero storage. Then we picked up these two felt baskets to wrangle all of our board games, since we find that we play them most frequently out on the upstairs deck after dinner.

Also if you are wondering what that white thing is above the TV, it is simply a much more efficient heating/cooling solution (frequently called a mini-split) than we had up here before. We got four distinct estimates from distinct local heating & air pros because we truly truly simply hoped a wall vent or two and not a big white wall mounted unit like the one we ended up with. But every single pro said this room would never be as comfortable as the rest of the house without this unit. So function beat form, and there you have it. Sure sufficient, they are right. This room is extremely comfortable – even with all those big windows, and two of the vents that were formerly powered by the system downstairs never would have been as efficient or effective.

Getting back to the furniture placement conversation… access to the deck was another helpful factor.

Obviously we hoped to have a pleasant straightforward path to the door that leads to our upstairs deck, and having the couch there in fact creates a pleasant corridor leading out there. Ideally the rug would be a little bit shorter so it does not encroach on the door frame, but that is hardly a deal killer for now. Again, simply working with what we have. It is kind of remarkable to realize that so much of our furniture that worked in a 3,150 square foot brick colonial can land here and also work so well in a more modern 1,400 square foot beach house.

I was initially hesitant to put this bookshelf in such a high traffic pathway, but it has proven to be strong (dare I type the words “Sherry was right”?). There have been zero bumping-into-it-incidents and it in fact makes sense of a weird sliver of wall that we’d otherwise have trouble using for any other functional purpose. I think the key is that it is especially shallow, and if you pay attention to how close you walk to the wall, you are typically like a foot away from it – even in a hallway or corridor.

One last note about this side of the room. We in fact have a large pendant light fixture on order (tall ceilings = we can fit something big and cool) that will hang from the ceiling junction box that you see in the picture below (it is centered on the window – simply hard to tell from this shot). Our plan was to live here first, during a hot summer month before making the call on ceiling fan versus light fixture, and thankfully we are halfway through June and this room stays fully cool and comfortable, so we can confidently go with a pleasant big pendant light without worrying we will sweat without a fan.

But now let’ swing around to the other half of the room: the workspace half. If the living area is the “party in the front,” this other side might be considered the “business in the back.” And yes, I simply compared this room to a mullet.

Since this house is significantly smaller than our last house, we no longer have the luxury of a separate office and art space for our kids – although it was only earlier this year that we separated those functions in our last (quite big) house. So we are hardly strangers to working with our kids drawing and crafting nearby. In fact that was the setup in our last office for over 6 years – and honestly if this wider desk would have fit in there we might have simply done that. The verdict after a month like this: it has been working out truly well – even through quarantine & distance learning, which feels like the ultimate test.

You may in fact recognize their desk setup as a condensed version of the mega desk that we created in their old art room. We used 2 of the 3 drawer bases (these Ikea pieces + these legs we brought in) and 1 of the 2 marble-look countertops (we donated the unused parts after getting here and finalizing the layout).

You may notice that the one counter is not long sufficient to fully span the two desks in the photo below (at least not with space for two chairs in the middle). Ikea does sell a longer 8 foot version of this counter but it does not seem worth the $249 delivery cost (!!!) to solve a problem that is not in fact a functional problem for anyone. Someday we might add butcher block to the ends or pick up the longer counter if we are road tripping by an Ikea – but for now it is simply fine.

The grown-up work area here is truly simply my old desk (well technically it is Sherry’s old desk from when we got married! Yes, we have had this for over 13 years!). We majorly pared down our files and paperwork before moving – digitizing some but mostly simply shredding stuff that we did not need anymore – so we do not need nearly as much file space as we had before. We have borrowed a few drawers in the kids’ desk that they were not using, and we have lesser-used files stashed in the bedroom for now.

So eventually we will likely figure out a way to put our “office stuff” in one place, but I do feel proud for sneaking my printer under one of the drawer bases (look closely and you will see it in the photo above and the one before that). It kinda lurks in the shadows and wirelessly spits out papers when needed. It is a bit harder to use the scanner this way, but we nearly exclusively scan from a free app on our phone anyways (the HP Smart App for anyone wondering – not sponsored, it is simply truly straightforward & fast).

I am in fact sitting in this quite spot right now as I type this and, I have to say, after 7 years of working facing a plain old wall – it is Remarkable to be able see so much greenery from my desk chair. I have windows on two sides. Bonus perk: I get to watch Burger sun himself out on the deck with a “Jealous, bro?” look on his smug little chihuahua face.

It is hard to tell from these photos, but there is in fact quite a bit of empty space that is still on this side of the room. In fact, we could float a second 8×10′ rug on this side. We likely will add one at some point, but we are glad to simply let the room percolate for a while. That way we can see what functional improvements we may need to make so we do not fall into the trap of buying stuff simply to fill a space that might get rearranged or tweaked anyway.

And speaking of simply filling space – yes, those benches to the left of the photo above are fairly much simply doing that right now. But we owned them, did not want to part with them yet (they might be useful in the future guest room at the foot of the bed for example), and there was an empty space for them right there, so… they live there for now.

So there you have it: the current state of our upstairs living area. Will it consistently look like this? Nope. But I am beyond grateful that so much of what we already owned and moved down here (and, in the case of the couch, were baaaaaarely able to wrestle up the stairs) is working so well for us.

Now excuse me while I go gaze out the windows for a little while. Or perhaps it is laptop time on the deck…

P.S. You can catch up on our whole Florida house renovation in simply 8 posts right here. From the exterior makeover to the projects we planned from afar to our recent floor refinishing, we have covered a lot of ground.

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