For the living room

For months I have been browsing photos, finishes, and dreaming about what kind of space we are going to create in our home. The “great room” as I like to call it will probably be the hub of our house. We will walk through there to get to our bed rooms, to the back yard… and sit there by our cozy fireplace on cold days. The ceiling is vaulted and starts at 17 feet and runs up from there. I thought I would share a few of my favorite inspiration photos from my pinterest board. Before we do that though, here is a reminder of the layout of  the main floor of the addition… less the bay window in our bedroom which is on the Right side of these drawings.

Because we live at a lake and have almost 3 kids, nothing can be too precious. There is sand, and wet bathing suits and sticky hands… we are in and out all summer, and in the winter time there are wet socks, and cold fingers, complete with runny noses. There are many styles I love, but some of which are not practical for our family. I am most drawn to warm, clean, and not too fussy. Most of these rooms feature white furniture, which won’t be the case for us 😉

I love the contrast of white with warm woods…

I think we are leaning towards a natural wood tone on the ceiling, instead of painting out the tongue and groove in white like I originally thought… This ceiling is just lovely.

We are planning on cladding the walls in wide planking. I like the contrast of the crisp white trim here, with the off white walls…

We have a very similar stair case going up to the second floor… I think it might make a perfect piano nook.

I think we will carry stone up to our mantel, and then clad the top of the fireplace surround in some sort of planking/panelling… I love the look of stone right to the ceiling, but that is not in the budget 😉 While I love the idea of having no tv in our living room, we don’t really have a good alternative to putting it anywhere else… So, I am working on where I could put it, NOT above the fireplace. The layout of the room and all of the windows is making that a little tricky… I want to decorate the mantel, not look at a big tv. I am open to ideas? we have windows on either side of the fireplace, which we plan to put built ins under… but it wouldn’t work to put a tv on.

Hope you enjoyed these inspiration pictures… I find them really helpful when it comes to figuring out what I do and don’t like, and also with explaining to my husband what exactly is going on in my brain 😉 Thankfully he is not the kind of guy that says “NO PAINTING OF WOOD SHALL OCCUR!” and is fully on board with paint, color… and a little bit of wood too 😉

-Miss Ash