For my mother-in-law’s birthday, we decided to give her living room a surprise makeover while she was out being distracted, galavanting around Disneyland for the day.
What did it take to turn this:
into this in 12 hours?
…two sets of hands, lots of love, and no Ty Pennington.
First order of business was to get rid of her 20-year-old couches and tables!
As you can see, these pieces were… well, sensible. Let’s just say it was very therapeutic to get these things into the garage and out of sight.
Once all the old furniture was moved out, we wasted not time getting to work unpacking, unwrapping, and assembling.
It was right around this time when we thought, ‘hey, I bet we could get this all done in a matter of a 2-3 more hours!’. This turned out to be pretty much the worst time estimate ever.
Starting from the outside in, I tackled the hallway sofa table first. This was an easy swap since there was plenty of space to work with. In fact, as you can see in the photo above, there was perhaps too much space to work with. I wasn’t a fan of the wall above the sofa table being occupied by a painting so I decided to make use of a giant branch and some picture frames. After lots of measuring, drilling, and Hercules-hooking, we managed to pull off a more cozy, classy hallway with additional places for photos.
The branch proved to be troublesome and was shedding wood bits everywhere, but it did the job and holds up the picture frames pretty nicely. With no time to paint and wait for drying, we had to make do with the existing white walls. This turned out to work to our advantage since the gray couches were so dark and provided a nice contrast.
Next up, the fireplace. Apparently, my mother-in-law loves Van Gogh’s. And today, it was finally time to turn these Van Gogh’s into Van Gones!
Now came the hard part: arranging the actual furniture, getting the new curtain panels up, and accessorizing. Out of these three tasks, the prize for most troublesome went to putting up the window treatments. We were pretty convinced that the walls were reinforced with steel behind the top of the windows since it was being anything but cooperative with the curtain rod hardware.
Note that in the photo above, the new couches were already in place, but do not forget what the real before couches looked like (scroll to beginning of post to see).
We ended up angling the couches and everything else to open up the room, and boy did it significantly open up the room. Although leaning bookshelves are meant to lean flat against the wall, we found no problems angling it in the corner and securing it to the walls on either side.
The accent chair and rug coordinated beautifully with the grays and blues in the room. Up to the day of the makeover, I had been asking my mother-in-law random questions about what colors she liked, and how she felt about her current space and was getting some pretty generic answers: ‘I like neutral colors’. So of course, I was worried about bringing in something as vibrant as this, but it ended up being a huge payoff, pulling in not only neutral colors, but also reflecting many of the accent colors.
Then, we turned to the other side of the room, which needed just as much love as well.
A new white coffee table, side table, and contrasting larger tv stand did just the job. When it came to accessorizing, the accent pillows provided the right amount of pop to the room and the glass coches softened up the edges, especially with the twine and natural rings filling.
Rounding out the finishing touches (no pun intended), I placed a makeshift wreath of flowers in the glass viewing pane of the coffee table.
Needless to say, she was thoroughly shocked and amazed when she walked in, and for the first hour, could not say anything else except how much she loved it, and would not change a single thing! All in all, this transformation was done for under $1000 and in under just 10 hours, with only a few minor setbacks and deviations from the original plan.
Happy Birthday, Janice!