Room Redo

So I was finally inspired.  I am not exactly sure what inspired me, but at least it came.  Before we even moved into this house I have been trying to plan our front room.  We have mostly all hand me down furniture.  It is really hard sometimes to make hand me down furniture work together.   Somewhere along the line I realized I wasn't really sure what style I even liked!  We had no idea what style was "US"!  So I began to think about it and really see what I was drawn too.  In the process I also realized I wasn't even that crazy about the colors in our house.  They were picked based on what we had in our house.... which as I just mentioned... weren't our style.  

YIKES!  How did I get here.  How did I get to my age and not know what I liked.  I still am not 100% sure what it is I like, but we are getting closer.  What i did realize is I don't mind the color in our front room, I just needed to style it more the way I wanted.  

This all sounds fine and good, but we are still on a VERY tight budget.  How do I make something I love on a budget I don't.  Well, slowly.  It became apparent that the rug we had in our front room was on it's last legs.  We had already removed the fringe (it was falling off) only to discover there was a shorter fringe underneath.  Well, as that began to fall off I decided to cut it down and make a reading rung for in front of the children's bookshelf.  But now we need something in our front room.  Knowing we can't afford on I decided to make one.  I can up with an idea and began to shop.  I needed some old sheets!  So i went to Goodwill.  While there I found some curtains.  And the sheets I needed.  The curtains were white tab curtains.  There were shorter than I needed, but I thought I could work with them.  I didn't find enough sheets to make into the rug so I headed to the fabric store.  Wouldn't you know they had a ton of upholstery and curtain fabrics on clearance on sale!  As I was digging through I found a fabric I swore was the EXACT same color as our walls.  So I bought it all!  When I got home I was pleasantly surprise to find it WAS the exact same color!  With a little more fabric I made these curtains

 

 I also found some new couch covers on sale at Big Lots!  They are great.  They are the stretchy kind made by SureFit.  They even had a color I could work with.

But then I didn't like the art arraignment in our house.  So I began reworking things.  I needed so big wall art thing above one of the couches.  SO I came up with an idea.  and here it is.

I LOVE it.  It took some work.  I had to find the frames, paint them distress them arraign them, hang them.  Then I cut the vinyl and hung that.  It was some work, but I really like how it turned out.

After that i turned my attention to some frames I already had.  I changed out some of the pictures, changed the arrangement, put them on a different wall. (I also painted and distressed them)  But I felt they needed a little something below them but above the bench.  So I cut some more vinyl!  I think at that point Chris thought I was a bit crazy.  ( I didn't think myself crazy until a few weeks later when Annalise took a pencil to labor intensive white squares.)

So the ironic part is, the rug that started the whole project isn't even started yet!  I also bought some fabric to recover the pillows, but that hasn't happened yet either.  Soon I hope!  We will see.