Living Room- the before

Over the next few weeks you are going to see a lot of before pictures. We have so many spaces in our home that are majorly in progress right now. Some, like my bedroom- are spaces I'm actively working to try and "finish" and already feel more complete. While others, like the living room (and the front room), are spaces that are going to take some time to evolve. Here is the current state of the living room.

It may not look like much, but we've already done quite a bit in here. We added a Frame TV above the fireplace, (which I turned off to take these photos). We purchased this gorgeous rug from High Fashion Home, I'm going to have to get better at photographing it because in person it's stunning, but the details are getting a little blown out here. We lucked out and found it in the clearance section and snagged it for $750, it was originally thousands. We assumed there was something wrong with it, but have yet to find a flaw.

The chairs and side table on this side of the room are place holders. Just furniture from our old houses...they aren't doing my eyes any favors, but they are a place to sit for now. I can't wait to add some curtains to that wall of windows!

On this side of the room we have our new Pottery Barn sofa- we found it at the outlet store and while it's beautiful, having a white sofa with small children has definitely taken a toll...we will probably need to get it professionally cleaned every year or so. Although I have taken some oxiclean and a razor to it (for the pilling) and that does work wonders.

This shelf was decorated so pretty last Christmas (in fact this whole room looked much better back then), but it's been looking like this for longer than I would care to admit. It's definitely on my to-do list to get this shelf whipped back into shape!

I do love the state of the current fireplace- all that molding is gorgeous! I'm desperate to do something about the brown brick though...even painting it white would be a massive improvement and maybe doing something special with it down the road like adding marble or a prettier brick?

We also have a big blank wall on the left side of the room, completely open- it needs something special there...but I'm still tossing ideas around- maybe a long console and a pretty mirror? So that's what our living room is currently looking like. Last Christmas we had decorated this room beautifully- a Christmas tree really helped flesh the space out, you can see how that looked right here.

Let me know what you think- do you have any rooms that you know are not going to come together overnight and may take years to flesh out? I wanna know!