Really Live in Your Living Room
Do you want to really live in your living room, rather than to use it for rare formal entertaining? After finishing our comfortable bedroom, it was time to head to the entertaining space.
My husband and I are both musicians. He plays guitar, ukulele and bass, both electric and acoustic. I play piano and sing. My man also likes to play with sound and recording equipment.
We had a recording/music studio set up in our last home, and he would regularly go shut himself in there to goof around, or to practice before a gig. His recording and sound tower was in the closet, all his guitars were hung on the walls, and it looked great. It was his sort of man-cave. There are more guitars behind the couch in this photo.
How Do You Want the Room to Function?
In any home, we have the piano to consider in our space. It requires a fairly large room if you want to have anything else in there with it. Our last house was two story with a large, curved staircase. The piano fit perfectly tucked into that stair space without taking up too much living space, yet it was still a beautiful focal point.
How Much Space Will You Need?
In our new home, the living room/dining room is bigger, but we don’t have that cool stairwell to annex for the piano. That got me thinking about how to decorate and make the piano seem like part of the decor. Like many families, we don’t use the formal living room that often. We would use it when we had people over for dinner, and at Christmas, but that was about it. We wanted to really live in our living room!
So rather than have a separate music room, we decided to set the living room up as our music space. This way we can use it more often for regular practice, as well as for entertaining. Everything is right there for an impromptu sing along, which easily happens when you mix instruments, wine, and good friends. Especially when so many of your friends are singers! Yep, we’re gonna be living in our living room.
We used our instruments as art
The instruments are beautiful and look pretty hip hanging around the room. We have a basket of small percussion instruments, as well as a cajon and djembe drum for anyone who doesn’t play an instrument but wants to join in the fun.
Our room was a complete blank slate when we moved in. The light over the dining table was nice, but we brought our own chandelier with us that matches a lamp we have for our living room. We didn’t love the light fixture above the breakfast table, so we moved this lamp to that room, and switched them out.
Define your layout how you really live
When the furniture arrived, we set up the room with what we could easily find. All the rest of the music equipment was in the mountain of boxes we had stacked in a spare bedroom. The room looked nice, but we knew it would look much more fun when we were finished with it. It was funny to think that our new room needed a make-over already!
Lay it all out in your living room
We finally found the instruments and mountings, and Hubby went to work hanging everything. He did it in just a few hours. Looks good, huh? This room didn’t have drapes, and I really like to have fabric to soften the starkness of walls and windows. They don’t have to close; they just need to be the finishing “jewelry” for the room. I found drapes online and had them delivered, along with rods and finials.
We loved the look of the drapes, and all the instruments and furniture, but it just wasn’t coming together. I had already bought a turquoise blue couch to go in our family room, and decided I preferred our old brown velvet couch for that space. That means the new couch would go in the living room. With the blue couch and patterned curtains, the pale dove grey walls were wrong. They just didn’t provide the energy needed for this fun room, and the cool walls didn’t complement the warm accessories.
Use paint to cozy up your living room.
Off to the paint store we went, with a drape in my bag, to coordinate shades. We tried several different colors on the walls, finally choosing a light golden yellow shade. Lee wanted to paint the walls himself, so he went to work taping off the ceiling, baseboards, and windows. It took him an afternoon to do that, then a day to paint two coats of primer, and a day to paint two coats of color. By the third day, he was hanging everything back on the walls.
We loved it, except there was one thing missing. There was a clear blank space between the dining section of the room, and the music section of the room. We needed some special art to fill that gap and marry the two distinct rooms. Rather than buy something, we looked around our existing art to see if something jumped out.
Find meaningful wall art to tie it all together
I really enjoy going to craft and art festivals to find handmade art and to support local artists. At one of my favorite festivals down in the San Diego area, we bought a fun 3-panel airbrush on metal that was nailed onto wooden frames. It’s rustic, but still beautiful.
I have a thing for plays-on-words, as one might expect of a writer. This one has “play me a memory” painted across the panels, along with piano keys across the bottom of all three panels. I know! Why didn’t we think of that to begin with? The colors also happened to be perfect for the new music dining room. We took the trio right off the wall of our family room and moved them into the new room. It was exactly the perfect thing.
Use Paint, Curtains and Art to really live!
This started a domino effect of art coming down, and moving around our house, but it was fun to find new walls for the items we’ve come to love and that make our house a home. It’s coming together room by room. We are so happy to have a beautiful space that really functions so we can live in our living room.
Do you love to decorate? You can really live in your living room, too! What types of items do you like to use in surprising ways to customize your living spaces? Do tell, in the comments below.
