Back to School & A Floor Plan

Today is Back to School Day here in Amherst, MA! My little cub enters first grade and I can’t hold back the tears as I write this. I’m so happy and excited for her but I know how much I’m going to miss having her with me all day… After a fun and easy summer spent snuggling, playing and being silly, it’s time to get back to a stricter routine and it’s bitter-sweet. It’s hard to let our children grow, isn’t it? Anyway, I wish all kids (big and small) a wonderful new school year!

And because I intended today’s post to be focused on design, I’ll share with you some thoughts about our new home and how it’s been slowly coming along. For those of you who are new here, we moved from Illinois to western Massachusetts earlier this summer. We are renting a spacious and sunny apartment, with beautiful views, and I’ve fantasized for weeks on how to best decorate it. My design constraints are dictated by the fact that we might be moving again next summer so choices must be not only budget-friendly (expensive purchases make no sense if we might have to ship our things overseas in a year), but also approved by our landlord. Piece of cake, yes? 🙂  I’m using this living room by Tom Scheerer as inspiration.

When we moved from Illinois, we sold all of our living room furniture. Some of it was IKEA and had barely survived a prior move from San Francisco, we were afraid a second cross-country journey will be fatal to their already delicate state. Also, we (mostly me 🙂 ) wanted a fresh start.

Since the rest of our rooms are now furnished with the things we already had, the only space that needed my urgent attention was the living room. We love to entertain often so it had to be ready as soon as possible to accommodate groups large and small. It also had to have space for our ever-growing collections – books, rocks, botanicals – we bring it all in. Although the space feels modern and lacks the traditional architectural details like crown molding, a fireplace or wall paneling, the room is large and airy, and has beautiful natural light throughout the day. There’s also a large window seat which is where you’ll find me early mornings. It looks out onto a small patch of garden and the forest right behind it so there’s always something interesting to watch – birds, bunnies and squirrels, even a disoriented raccoon at times. By the way, we just found out last night that our small college town has a considerable population of black bears and skunks… fingers crossed they won’t visit!

Back to our living room. I decided to approach the design process as I would for a client. I listed all the different ways we love to use the room  – reading, occasional TV watching, entertaining, relaxing and yoga. It needed to have plenty of storage space and comfortable seating. As for mood, I wanted to create a cozy, cottage style room with plenty of color in fabrics and accents. Nothing too fussy, yet still pretty and traditional in style. Like this…

After gathering enough inspiration to get me started, we measured the room. It’s rectangular in shape, approximately 13’x11′ with large double windows on one wall, facing south. I then used the measurements to draw a floor plan to-scale and used it to play around with different furniture arrangements. After a few trials, this is the layout we liked best:

I debated with my family on ditching our large screen TV but majority won so I’ll have to live with it (at least for a while anyway, I’m not giving up). Once we had a furniture arrangement that I felt worked best for the room and how we live, I did a few perspective sketches to make sure it will actually look as good as it did in my mind.

I love how it turned out, even if it will take some time to find all the right pieces – like the right size ottoman on the left- as well as accessories. Our sofa, bookshelves and chairs have been delivered a few weeks ago, so now it’s all about scouring local antiques shops and Craigslist to fill in the missing details. I’m also deciding on the color scheme and have ordered fabric samples for a new sofa slipcover, pillows and armchairs. But I’ll more about that in a future blog post.

Have a great day!

xo,

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