How do you restyle a room: do you start from scratch or work with your existing furniture pieces and then add new ones?
Today, I finally get to reveal our living room makeover! And I’ll tell you about my design process.
I’ve worked with Sauder Woodworking Co. twice before, and this time they challenged me to pick one Sauder piece, to showcase its versatility and functionality, and to pair it with a complimentary piece.
We have a long and narrow living room, with a fireplace on one end of the room and the TV on the other side. I decided to focus the makeover on the TV side.
Our living room was nice, but now looking back, it needed some love.
No matter what your approach is, updating a room with Sauder furniture is easy because they offer so many colors, sizes, and styles — from farmhouse furniture to more modern pieces and everything in between. They created 50 collections so far!
Blue Cottage Living Room Redo
I was given so many choices for the possible showcase piece that our living room makeover could’ve gone into many directions. Sauder designs furniture that truly work with anyone’s style, at an affordable price.
When making over a room, I always look at what is already there and then also think about furniture pieces we have in other rooms of the house. I’m constantly moving furniture around — I buy smaller pieces on purpose so I can find different uses for them throughout the house.
In this case, I wanted to also repurpose two industrial-style shelves that I had previously used in my booth at the Newburgh Vintage Emporium.
After looking at my choices, I came up with a creative plan for the Sauder Writing Desk from the International Lux collection.
We don’t need a desk in our living room, but we did need a nicer TV stand! I knew I could make this desk work perfectly with our cottage decor style, even though it has more modern lines.
So here is the reveal of our restyled living room!
I love the shelves on both sides of the desk, and the TV is at a perfect height now. The tall mirror disguises our electric panel, that’s why I kept it behind the shelf.
I replaced our old TV with a bigger HD TV, and in this picture you can see how I was able to hide the cable box:
I put one of our vintage trunks under the desk and elevated it with four planters so all the cables and the cable box are hidden.
I love coming up with clever solutions like this, and it also allowed me to combine modern with vintage.
We now store out DVDs in the two desk drawers, and the vintage tray looks nice on the black trunk.
I’ve painted the chairs white since I took these pictures.
Since the desk is gray, I paired it with a gray Ellis Accent Chair. It’s not very tall, which works best in my small cottage, yet it’s so wide that you can comfortably put your feet under you when you read or have friends over.
I added a gray rug with a trellis pattern to complement the gray from the desk and chair — that allows me to decorate with more colorful accent decor on the shelves.
I like to create vignettes in all of our rooms. I grew up in a house full of antique collections, and I have enough collections of my own I like to display.
We’ll eventually replace our sofa, but for now I update it with a sofa cover.
We are totally loving our restyled living room! We added more seating with the chair, and a better solution for our TV. We have already had friends and family over several times, and they are all enjoying the new look and bigger TV as well.
I should mention that the International Lux Writing Desk is recommended by Sauder to be used just as a writing desk. They haven’t tested and approved it to hold heavy things, like I’m using it here as an entertainment stand. Please follow the manufacturer instructions to be sure you’re using it safely.
{This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sauder. The opinions and text are all mine.}