I recently posted a picture on Facebook of one side of our living room.

It got a bunch of likes and I had a few people ask me some different things about the picture: “I want to see more!”

“Is that a formal living room?”

“Where’s the TV?” This one was my favorite.

I had kind of a hard time explaining that no, it’s not a formal living room, it’s just the formal part of our living room and we didn’t really know what to do with and that’s just kind of how it turned out! So I figured I’d do a post that would give some updates on our living room progress and talk about how we ended up with a formal section of our living room.

So our house is basically a big square. The stairs are in the back, and there is a half bath in the middle of the downstairs that separates all of the rooms (living room, dining room, foyer, laundry/mudroom, kitchen and sunroom. Our living room is the largest room and is essentially the whole right side of the bottom floor. So it’s really long and narrow. Here’s a rough blueprint of the downstairs for reference – definitely not to scale as it was create by yours truly. 🙂

We also had to decide what type of couch to buy. We both wanted a sectional, but most that we wanted would have been too wide for the space. After some careful measuring and several trips to different furniture stores we found something versatile enough at Ashley Furniture – it was a combination of a couch with a chaise and a love-seat that essentially create the same feel as a sectional would. Below is the layout that we ended up going with which includes some future improvements (like the built-ins around the fireplace and the french doors to the sunroom).

And here are some actual pictures of the living room right now, to give you an idea of what the layout looks like in real life!

The thing I’m most excited about are the built-ins around the fireplace. Right now we have a little temporary bookshelf that houses all of the tech stuff – playstation, tv box, wifi box, movies, etc. But, we plan to bump the fireplace out into the room a little bit (and into this century) and put some shallow built-ins on both sides.

But here’s how it looks right now. I think it’s the most sad little fireplace and floating mantle you ever did see:

The update we are currently working on is adding french doors between the living room and the sunroom. If you follow me on instagram (@anaspiringabode) you might have seen that I scored I very old pair of french doors on Craigslist a few weeks ago from one of Richmond’s historic districts, Bellevue. I’m so excited about the charm they are going to add, and about being able to keep the dogs in the sunroom when we have company over! I think it will really change the way the whole space feels.

And, one of my favorite little nooks in our living room is the space we designated for our doggies. I hung three 8×10″ pictures from our engagement shoot into large matted frames and underneath lay their living room beds.

The smaller blue one is SUPPOSED to be for June (our little GSP) but Wyatt (our chocolate lab) likes to squeeze himself in there. It’s really funny! He just wants to be cuddled.

SO!  That’s how we decided to handle the challenge that was our odd shaped living room! I think that it works pretty well! Every inch of space is being used for something, and the furniture is all pretty functional. I can’t wait to put the final touches on! I’ll be sure to update once we get the french doors and built-ins finished!