Palace Project Part 1: The Living Room

As I mentioned previously, I am not an interior decorator. At work, I'm that person that makes most of her anchor charts on white tablet paper and most definitely does not have cutesy borders and bulletin boards and stuff all over the room. I'm not that artistically creative person. In fact, I'm pretty sure I wrote an anti-ode to art class as poetry assignment for 8th grade English class. So as you can see, I'm not artistically inclined.

Naturally, when it came to deciding what to do with the living room, I had no idea where to start. All I knew was that I wanted a zen space. One that's really peaceful and calming. I started looking up inspiration rooms, and came across this beauty:

I found this picture here.

I love it! I love the pretty green on the walls and I love the curtains. I love how they brought everything together with the greens in the pillows, on the couch, on the rug and in the chairs. It's so beautiful! This is my inspiration room for the living room.

Decorating bloggers and experts say you should choose the wall color based on something else in the room that inspires your color scheme. I didn't do that. I just saw this room and decided I wanted green. I was going to replace all of the furniture, but I want to keep my media unit (to keep down cost) and my coffee table was a special-ordered gift, so I don't want to replace it. It's multicolored but it has a lot of green, so I think I'll make it the focal point in the room and build the other colors in around it.

I went to HOM furniture with a friend when they were having a sale and found this couch

It is totally customizable, so I picked out my own color (gray), fabric (comfy), arm style (rolled), and can even pick which side the chaise is on (the right). (Yeah, I got a chaise. I'm cool like that.) The super nice salesman even customized the seat cushions to fit my height (I'm fairly tall). How cool is that?! Good job, dude.

I'm excited for my new couch! The best part about it is that since I'm getting a new one, I can donate my old to two fabulous young girls who are getting their first apartment and are in need of new stuff (just like me, three years ago). The couch is coming right around the time they are moving! I'm so excited to be able to pay it forward and help someone else the way my friends and family helped me. Yay! Life is beautiful.