The Living Room

Our living room is looking pretty bare at the moment, as you can see from the pictures, but it has got great potential! The walls are white so it's a nice blank canvas to work with, and I like that it has floor boards instead of a carpet.  

There are two windows and a pair of patio doors into the conservatory, but despite this the room is still quite dark, because this side of the house is surrounded by a little woodland area, and the trees overhang the house. There are pro's and con's to that I guess; con -  being terrified the trees would fall onto our house the other day during the mega storm, pro - the lovely view and feeling of privacy we get, even though we live in a pretty built up area. 

Anyway, luckily the lamp in the room is super bright, so that helps to solve the darkness problem. The other thing will be to get less heavy curtains.

The sofas we currently have are both ancient, and I am looking forward to buying a proper, comfortable sofa soon.

We have decided that the colour scheme we are going to go for in this room is grey and yellow! I am quite excited to be tearing myself away from the mints and turquoises I have been obsessed with of late.
  
The plan is to get a nice grey sofa, and pepper it with pretty yellow cushions. I'd also like to get a single chair, perhaps in yellow fabric or a pattern.  I think I am going to try painting the fireplace grey, and I will definitely be getting new bright curtains, as the ones we have at the moment  are quite heavy, and make the room feel darker than it needs to be. I'm also dying to get a nice fluffy grey rug, as it is a little bit cold with no carpet at all. 

I am hoping I can pick up a coffe table on one of my dump trips, which I might paint to go with the colour scheme if it is a bit battered. I also want to find a wooden corner unit with drawers that the TV will fit on. I'd like to be able to hide our games and dvd's inside.

I found the glass display cabinet, pictured below, on one of my previous dump trips. I believe it cost me £8. It was a bit worse for wear at the time so I gave it a lick of paint to spruce it up a bit!  I'm not sure if it will fit with the new colour scheme, so I may have to re-pain it, or it might find its way to the spare bedroom.

Here is a little collage of things I have found which I think would look great together. I think we are going for a bit of a 60's vibe. I can't wait to start putting this into action!

Curtain Fabrics - John Lewis, Boyd Chair - Next, Walton Sofa & Footstool - Next, Alhede Rug - Ikea, Little Trees Cushion - John Lewis, Buttons Cushion - Next

What do you think? Are you a fan of grey and yellow? Have you seen any furniture or accessories about that would match my colour scheme? I'd love to know if you have!

Laura xXx

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Room for Improvement: Dining Room Make Over

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have received an email from Money Supermarket. They asked me if I would like to take part in their Room For Improvement challenge. 

The brief? Improve a room of your choice for just £50 using whatever methods you like!

The best part? They gave each participant the £50 to do the challenge! Since Chris and I are using just one room as our bedroom, lounge, study and dining room, I decided to improve one area of it. It was a tough decision but in the end I settled on the dining area. Primarily because before there wasn't really one before, just a dining table which we didn't use! Take a look at the before and after photos, then I will tell you what I spent my money on.

BEFORE

AFTER

So we did a bit of rearranging and moved the dining table to what had previously been our lounge area.  First things first we needed some chairs. I scored 4 for just £10 at a car boot sale! (I'm only showing 2 in the pictures because we don't have room for all 4 yet) Next I had to paint them, so I went and bought a tin of Craig &; Rose 1829 Pale Mortlake Cream, from B&Q for £11.98 and got to work sanding them down. Four coats later and they were nearly finished, but I wanted to add a little bit of an accent colour. Luckily we had some light blue paint left over from another project, so I added the finishing touches! Here are the before, during and after pictures of the chairs. 

I also bought some plain white calico off of ebay, which cost £4.20 including postage.  I simply covered over the horrible brown leather effect fabric, and used a fabric staple gun on the reverse to secure.

Next up, I wanted something for the centre of the table, so I bought a cute little cut glass pot for £1 from a car boot sale. I decided to continue with the blue theme, and found some spray paint at The Range for £4.99 to match the colour on my chairs. I had a plant which I had been meaning to re-pot, so I thought he would be right at home in the centre of the dining table.

I didn't want to hang anything on the walls, since we will be moving in a few weeks time (into our very own house, yay!) But, the wall did look rather bare, so I came up with an alternative; really tall flowers! I have always loved the way the cherry blossom looks, it reminds me of beautiful Japanese paintings. So, I was rather chuffed when I found faux cherry blossom branches for £2.99 each at Dunelm Mill. I bought 3 of them, and popped them into a painted decanter which I already had.

I found a rather lovely jug in TK Maxx FOR £13, and obviously I needed to buy it to match the pretty pink cherry blossom flowers. With my last pennies I bought some wine glasses for £3.14 from Dunelm Mill, since we will definitely be needing those the day we move into our new house!

Total Spend = £57.28 (Ok, a little bit over, but not far off!)

While I was perusing my Bloglovin feed this morning I spotted a few of my bloggy friends who had also taken part in this challenge. If you fancy seeing some more ways to brighten up a room for £50 why not pop over to Claire, Rachel and Harriet's blogs.

Laura xXx

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