House: the living room (p. 4)
The living room is pretty straightforward - as I understand it, the first floor had been 4 separate rooms when the previous owner moved in, and he cut archways and opened up the walls, so the living room is now across the whole front of the house, with a big arched opening to the dining room. It’s a really nice open living space. (note: just like it's not our furniture, not our curtains, and not our wallpaper, that is not our cat.)
One thing I like about it is that it’s one big room with a clear invitation to have two subspaces; the smaller half (by the dining room) with a cozy sofa for TV-watching and the larger half (by the front stairs) with good conversational arrangement and books and music stuff, and a sofa that doesn’t swallow you entirely. The secondary benefit of this arrangement is that there’s no need for matching sofa and loveseat, so it doesn’t push my “consumer” buttons very hard, even though the eventual plan is to move the current sofa=futon upstairs to the guest bedroom. Needed - 1 squishy comfy larger sofa with possible sleeper conversion, 1 firmer-sitting loveseat or smaller sofa. I’ll let Craigslist know. Conveniently, the preferred color is “bland”. I think that’s somewhere between taupe and khaki. Bland furniture does not interfere with painting the walls whatever color we want.
Ah, color. It started out when we were thinking the living room had a chair-rail, and the low half would be sage green and the high half would be cream/sand. But there’s no chair rail. How about keep the cream and sage, but do an accent wall, then? Well, actually, how about a darker green accent wall, sort of foresty? But maybe that’s too high contrast, so what about sage all over and forest on the accent wall? Are accent walls totally a HDTV early 2000’s fad phenomenon? Will we regret it? Maybe just paint the whole thing sage. Or forest. It keeps getting greener and greener. I’m wondering what the room will end up looking like if there’s not a semi-white in the furnishings to lighten it up. Forest is alluring, but maybe I do want to back up to sage.
Won’t all that green look terrible with the blue and grey fleck carpet, though? Not a problem, we’re 95% resolved to install wood floors. There are a couple of different ways to make a wooden floor; there are fiberboard panels with computer-generated wood-grain laminated on the top, and there’s what’s basically chipboard or plywood with a thin (1/16”) layer of hardwood on top, pre-finished and ready to go. The nice thing about these laminate and engineered wood floors is that they’re not just tongue-and-groove to help you keep them lined up as you glue or nail them in place (the way real hardwood flooring works) but the tongues and grooves are more like snap-together legos. They click into place, and that’s the end of it… if you’re good. I hear that once you know what you’re looking at, it’s pretty easy to walk into a room and determine which wall the installer started at because the non-professional doesn’t get good at this until about 1/3 of the way across the floor, so there are little gaps in the first section. My cousin compares it to when you and your little brother used to do the same craft project at cub scouts and he didn’t do it wrong exactly, it just doesn’t look right, and yours is much neater and straighter and tidier than his and you feel all smug until your mom points out that you’re two years older, and surely he’ll do at least that well when he’s your age, and then you start feeling whatever the opposite of smug is and vow never to make a woven construction-paper placemat ever again. We’ll have help from Dirk’s dad, so with luck we can fake the floor installation adequately.