Furnishing The Living Room With The Ikea Sofa

So… the living room. First it looked like this:

Then it looked like this:

Then it looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

Although the salmon pink walls, orange-brown bricks, and all of that dark wood trim & paneling is a far cry from our vision for this room down the line (we keep changing our minds, but today we are dreaming of something like this for the brick, coffered ceilings like this, and this for the paneling someday) it certainly feels a lot homier already. You know, with a couch to sit on instead of a pile of non-sit-on-able furniture.

Oh and we shared this picture on Instagram/FB a few nights back, but do not you think salmon is Burger’s color? That is one good lookin’ chihuahua. Not that I am biased or anything.

As for our sectional shrinkage (I will pause while you titter) we needed a giant sofa for our last house’s giant 25′ long living room. Pictures truly did not do that room’s colossal size justice, but the sectional was thirteen feet long and nearly that deep (the average sofa is typically around seven feet long for comparison).

And while some folks enjoy giant rooms and giant sofas, our first house‘s cozy den was the room we missed the most…

… so we fairly much thought it was fate when we saw our new house and the living room reminded us of that cozy room. I think they are cousins. Here is the before shot of our first house’s den to compare with the first picture in this post.

Anyway, our Karlstad sectional from Ikea (Karl for short) came in four switch-around-able pieces, so we chose that keeping the sofa + the chaise (and losing the loveseat and corner seat that made it into a giant U-shaped couch) made the most sense for our new living room.

So without buying any additional pieces we were able to simply connect the exterior arm that used to live on the end of the sectional to the sofa part and remove the extra stuff in the middle (corner piece and loveseat). Only took about fifteen minutes. And as for the unused two pieces that we took out, we stuck those up in the unfinished storage room with a plastic drop cloth around them. Why did not we craigslist them? We simply figured selling the corner and loveseat to a sofa that is incomplete without another end piece that someone would have to purchase might fetch us $20 tops, and it is worth more simply to hold onto them in case we get a new living room couch in a decade or so and decide to use Karl up in the bunkroom/movie room when we finish that space down the line.

We also built the console behind the sofa two years ago, which we made in three interlockable pieces. And the cool thing is that we realized that if we left out the middle piece it nearly fit perfectly behind the freshly shrunk sofa. Nearly is the key word since it is still about 6″ too long (over on the fireplace side there is some overhang) but it works for now, and we are planning to shorten it so it is fully fitted for this room.

After a few years of living with a big padded storage ottoman instead of a coffee table and a console that spans the width of the sofa, we have simply learned that it is truly functional for our family to have the console (for things like tea at night) and an ottoman (for hiding toys and for Clara to lounge on during the day).

Oh and you might notice that the second hole in the brick fireplace wall, which was meant for firewood back in the day, has been covered by a leaning frame. It simply felt like a big dark hole whenever I glanced at it from the sofa, and since this fireplace is no longer functional (we’d enjoy to slip a gas insert into it down the line) we did not need it staring at us while we gasped over the last four minutes of last week’s Game Of Thrones episode. Seriously, I audibly gasped at least a dozen times in that span of about four minutes.

As for the other side of the room, we are keeping the 80’s wet bar closed off with doors for now (we’d enjoy to expand the doorway to the kitchen into that area down the line since we do not truly have a use for it) but I did have some lively putting things on the built-ins in the corner.

Yup, it turns out when my house is full of freshly deposited moving chaos, I like to putter around with books and ceramic animals. So while it looked like this on moving day…

… within 24 hours it looked like this.

The rest of the house still looked fully trashed, but this little corner was glad. #smallvictories

Oh and we took down a bunch of doors on the first floor that blocked off spaces that we prefer to be left open for better flow (the doors on the right block the foyer from the kitchen and the doors on the left block the kitchen from the living room).

Now we can peek in on Clara in the living room while we cook in the kitchen, and there is a pleasant view of the big bay of windows in the back of the kitchen from the foyer instead of staring at two dark and heavy doors about ten feet from the entryway. Clearly there is still some crazy color going on when you catch a few rooms in one view, but you gotta start somewhere…

We also took down the doors that blocked off the kitchen from the dining room. It is remarkable how much breezier it feels – even with a bunch of rooms full of dark blue trim, wood paneling, and a boatload of wallpaper (there are at least five distinct types of wallpaper going on in our house). Speaking of wallpaper, that is fairly high on my attack list. I think I am going to test out a bunch of distinct techniques for you folks and rate them all (should be lively to see which are urban Hands-on legends and which ones work the best). And… that is the kind of thing that gets me excited. Yup. I am grinning at the computer right now. Get a hold of yourself Petersik.