Living room reshuffle

Beset by the winter blues and a strange restlessness during the last few weeks of January, I felt a change was in order. While leafing through Decorate by Holly Becker for inspiration, I came across a great tip for organizing spaces: check how a room "flows" by having people over and observing how they use the space during a party.

Thinking back to a a December potluck lunch I hosted at home, I realized that even with a packed dining room, people didn't naturally "spill over" into our living room. Our old layout below was great for holing up in front of the TV (which is how we survived many a long winter night), but because the back of the daybed effectively closed off the room, it didn't feel open and inviting to other people.

So, with my dictatorial brain and my husband's considerable brawn, we spent one January evening moving furniture around late into the night. The goal was to open up the room without moving any of the paintings or the mirror. As renters, we can't drill without the landlord's consent, and taking things off the painting rails is really, really difficult!

We tried a lot of configurations that felt cramped and weird, until we realized there was just one thing that we had to do...

... and that was to rearrange our wine crates!

By reconfiguring them into a kind of wide U/V shape, we were able to put the TV in a position that everyone in the room could see, without making it the focal point of the room. This also filled up a dead corner, hid unsightly wires, and opened up the room. We ended up with this new layout.

I'm really happy with it! It seems like we have much more space now. And we've begun to actually use the armchair as a reading chair.

I also took my restlessness out on a tall stack of magazines that I'd been holding on to since 2005. I tore out pages with striking images and filed them into categories such as female faces, female figures, textures, travel, interiors, recipes and so on. This was all that was left after the cull: a stack of magazines less than a foot high. #winner

The finishing touch: lighting.

Dark winter nights are when I really feel how lighting can lift one's mood. To help our linen-shaded lamps battle the dark, I repurposed old glass jars that I'd been saving into tea light holders. My lola, compulsive hoarder of Ludy's Peanut Butter glasses, would be proud of me!