Design Planning for Our New Living Room #RFBloggers

I am partnering with Raymour & Flanigan to Furnish my New Living Room.  All opinions are 100% my own.

When my family and I moved to the country 3 years ago, the house we purchased was small.  Very small.  With plans to add on, we made the best of the house in the meantime.  I like the thought of small spaces.  They are cozy and usually required less upkeep.  Because my family includes my husband who is 6’7″ and our 4 growing children…the small house thing was really starting to get uncomfortable.  We have been longing for the day when we could finally stretch out a bit and have a little bit of space to ourselves.  Well, it’s finally here!  We are slowly moving things over to the “New” part of our home and I’m just so excited!  I have been dreaming about our New Living Room and now it’s finally ready!  It’s like a blank canvas ready to be furnished and decorated.

You may remember that last year I partnered with Raymour & Flanigan to create a Cozy Kitchen Nook.  It was such a fun project and it made our everyday meal time go much smoother in our then small house.  I’m very excited that I was given the opportunity to partner with Raymour & Flanigan again for our New Living Room and for a few more projects around my home that I will be sharing with you all throughout the year.

Our New Living Room space is pretty open.   It’s open to our new kitchen and you can see straight from one end of the house to the other, which I absolutely love.

When we were planning our addition, we wanted to make sure our New Living Room had plenty of windows all the way around for a lot of natural light.

Part of the reason we moved to the country is because we loved the open space.  Out of our front Living Room windows we have a view of Lake Erie.  The lake is still frozen over right now, but in the summer I just love glancing out at the pretty blue water in the distance.  The rest of the windows will give us a view of my husband’s barn (I guess I have to let him have a view of what he loves too right?! 🙂 ), along with some recently cleared property of ours, my garden and the woods.  I wanted to be able to sit and enjoy spending time with my family in here while also enjoying all of the different seasons and the views of the country.

Because I wanted this space to be bright and airy, I decided to paint the walls a pale blue.  I really like this color because it’s still fairly neutral, but looks pretty with the beautiful sky and lake views we have here with our house being up on top of a hill.

Now for the hard stuff.  Picking out furniture.  We’ve moved quite a few times on our way to our dream home here, and in that time I’ve really learned a lot about what I do and don’t like for our living room furniture.  For starters, I’ve found that when you have children, your furniture needs to be very durable and easy to clean.  If one of my children gets sick or my youngest is trying to climb up the arms of the couch with a crayon, I need to be able to clean the furniture and still have it look nice.  As much as I love to have rules around our house about jumping and climbing, I’ve come to realize that sometimes my children can be overly rambunctious and sometimes a drink accident may happen.

Our current Living Room furniture set has really let me down.  We bought the set only 5 years ago and it isn’t doing well.  I really loved the look of this sofa set when we purchased it and I thought it would last us a while.  I liked the curves of the top, the wooden arms of the chairs and I loved the fact that the “leather blend” would be easy to clean.  Last year all of the pieces started to crack and peel and I have been busy cleaning up those little sofa pieces all over my house.  I was dreading putting this in our New Living Room.  I’m even embarrassed to show this picture- but here it is.  This is the ugly, old sofa that isn’t making it’s way into that space.

What a mess, huh?

Last month I started browsing around on Pinterest for some inspiration for our new space.  I also took a few hours to browse through Raymour & Flanigan’s Catalog and website for functional but stylish ideas.  Don’t know your style?  They have an awesome “What’s Your Style” section on their website complete with a quiz and some really nice ideas to get you started on rooms in your home.

I wrote down a list of items that I really liked and headed off to the nearest Raymour & Flanigan store to do a little shopping.  The customer service there was amazing!  They never made me feel rushed, they answered all of my questions (I usually have a lot of them) and even measured things for me when I was referring to my notes to find out if a piece would fit perfectly in a spot I had envisioned.

We needed a soda!  That was my number 1 priority.  What I was looking for in a sofa was comfort, but a neat, clean look as well.  I wanted a color that was neutral that could be styled with different colored blankets and different patterned throw pillows for different seasons throughout the year.  I also wanted the sofa to be able to comfortably seat our large family of 6.  It would also need to seat other people that may be over on occasion for birthdays and holidays.  Our New Living Room is roughly 20 x 30, so we are fortunate to have a lot room to work with.

My husband thought a sectional would be a logical choice, but I just wasn’t sure if that’s the look I wanted.  There was one sectional, the soft microfiber Foresthill 4 piece Sectional that would fit perfectly on the one side of our living room.  Online it looked comfortable, but I liked it so much more when I saw it in the store.

It was really comfortable, I liked the neutral color (ottoman shown here in optional color) and the seats were nice and deep, which meant my husband would have a lot of room to stretch out and be comfortable too.

I also really liked the Howell Sofa though.  I fell in love with the classic look of it online and because it came with coordinating pieces, I thought the whole set would look nice too.  I really liked the sofa in the store and my husband said it was comfortable, but with a large space to fill, would it look small?

Next, I wanted to look at the Cindy Crawford Cape May Collection.  These pieces had a relaxed, beachy, cottage type feel which I loved and the material was a little tougher, like a denim.  It looked durable, but I wasn’t too sure abut the size.  For me, being only 5′ tall, it was great, but the back of the sofa didn’t seem to have that larger, taller-type frame that might work better for my husband and my tall children.

Decisions, decisions…

The piece I was really excited about looking at in the store was the Merrick 65″ Console with Fireplace.  We have a real fireplace in our old living room (which will now be a dining room) and we just love the look and cozy feel it gives to the room.  We didn’t build a fireplace in our New Living Room, so I thought this would give us that cozy, inviting feel to this space too.  I liked the look of the stone around the fireplace and of course the ample storage.  We don’t really need it for heat (although if you do- it will keep you nice and toasty) because we have radiant floor heat installed, this would be a really great console.  Right now our TV is mounted higher on the wall and I really don’t like it and I like that this would make the Tv more at eye level.

The Sierra 60″ Console caught my eye as we were walking around the store and I really liked the rustic look of the wood.  It matched pretty well with the bamboo flooring we have in our kitchen, so that was nice.  For this console you have the option to purchase additional pieces to make it an Entertainment Center.  The center on display was really beautiful, but I’m not sure I want to make a commitment to such a large piece in that room.  More decisions…

After getting comfy on all of the different sofas and matching pieces with the samples of carpet, wood and paint I brought with me to the store, I finally placed my order!  In 3 Days (That’s right- only 3 days!) our beautiful New furniture was delivered!  I can’t wait to share the “after” with you all – stay tuned!

Which items do you like the best?  Make sure you check back after Easter for the Big Reveal!

Thinking about New Furniture?  Now is the time to buy!  Raymour & Flanigan is having one of their biggest sales of the year right now!  You can save up to 33% of selected items and of course get that lovely 3 Day Delivery!  Find the closest Raymour & Flanigan store near you by clicking HERE.

Set aside a little time – even on your lunch break, head to Raymour & Flanigan, grab a complimentary bottle of water and browse around! 🙂