ORC Week 2: A Pet-Friendly Living Room Makeover

We’re already in Week 2 of the One Room Challenge.  Last week, I made the last-minute decision to throw down the gauntlet and enter this eight-week room makeover challenge as a guest participant. My living room will be receiving a much-needed transformation.  If you’d like to see the room I’m working on and the issues I plan to address, check out my post from Week 1.

You can find the projects that the other Challenge participants are working on here.

My final goal is a practical one:  An elegant, airy, and inviting living room that can also withstand pet hair and pet stains.

My Progress So Far – Or Lack Thereof

According to the rules of the Challenge, participants are to post a progress report every week.  But today I’m here to report that I haven’t made much progress – unless you consider indecision to be progress.

I’ve been exploring lots of different ideas but not really coming to any conclusions.  I’m just really hoping this is a necessary part of this particular journey and will eventually lead to success.

Here is what has me so befuddled.

Choosing A Wall Color

Maybe it’s because I’ve been looking forward to repainting this room for so long, or maybe it’s because I’m so used to a deep, moody color, but choosing a new wall color has been much more difficult than I anticipated.  I want a light, elegant color but, like a kid in a candy store, I’m reaching in too many directions.

The paint color on the moldings, including the large cove molding between the walls and ceiling, is a heavy cream.  I’d like to keep that color because I think it works in this room.  So I need to find a color that works well with it.

I’m running out of wall space to test different colors.

Chris said I should just keep going with the paint samples since I was starting to create an interesting mural.

Hmm, a mural.  Maybe that’s what we need.

Furniture Configuration

To accommodate foot traffic from the front door to anywhere else in the house, having the furniture largely against the walls just seemed like the simplest option.

Below is a bird’s eye view of the existing furniture configuration.  The front door is on the top left side of the sketch.

There’s also a doorway to the main floor hall on the lower left side and a large entryway into the dining room on the bottom right side.

And there are two large windows.  So we’ve got three doorways and two large windows to work around here.

As I mentioned last week, I’m not crazy about the way the sofa blocks access to our largest window and the nice, serene garden view we have from it.

The sofa is going away anyhow, but what to put in its place?  I’m considering a loveseat.  After all, the center seat on a sofa is a bit like the center seat on a plane:  It’s never your first choice.  With a loveseat instead, we could create a cozy U-shaped conversation area similar to what I have circled below.   (Ignore the furniture outside of the circle, which will be subject, I’m sure, to much reshuffling and perhaps even banishment from the room.)

This plan makes the large window the focus of the conversation area while still allowing for decent traffic flow from the front door to the other two doorways.

In addition to the loveseat, the area would have two chairs and a low bench along the window.  So, it would seat six people.

It looks good on paper, but will it work?

To get an idea of what it would be like, we arranged our existing furniture into roughly this configuration.  (The small table against the window is just a placeholder for the low bench in my plan.)

The configuration dominates more of the room than I had expected.  Of course, the sofa is larger than a loveseat would be.  But our existing chairs are smaller than what I have in mind.  And adding a bench might be too much.

I am a bit concerned that having a loveseat instead of a sofa will throw off the scale of the room and make everything look like doll furniture.  But having the window and the garden view as a focal point is really growing on me.

So there we have it:  More questions than answers at this point.

The One Room Challenge usually stretches over six weeks, but this one is eight weeks.  I’m grateful for that because, right now, it’s looking like I will definitely need the extra time.

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