Help us redesign our living space!

In My Humble Opinion
1

We decided it was a fantastic idea to throw a wedding for 200 of our closest friends and enemies and then the next day leave for a whirlwind honeymoon all over central and eastern Europe while at the same time moving everything out of our living and dining rooms to have our floors refinished! (Yay.) And now we’re back and the floors are amazing and the rest of our shit looks like smacked ass!

Before we left I asked for advice about interior designers (here) but I thought, hey, let’s crowdsource this bitch. I’ve seen other people get some good advice from this board on how to arrange their stuff, so let’s hope you guys can help me out!

Here are our issues:

  1. The house was built in 1928 and has no real natural space for a TV. We are Americans and our TV is bigger than our coffee table. We have considered mounting the TV over the fireplace but are concerned about the viewing angle. Plus you still have to have a place to put all your little black boxes anyway.

  2. We don’t want all new stuff, we want to make sure we haven’t overlooked any better way to arrange the stuff we have. We are willing to consider a new couch and almost certainly a new TV stand (ours is from much thicker TVs and our flat screen doesn’t need nearly as much room.)

  3. I want to make sure the New Mr. Z is happy with everything - he moved into my house and I want him to feel it’s his home too, and this is sort of a chance to let him put his stamp on things.

  4. Our couch is gross. We need to decide if we want to recover it (it’s a Karlstad from IKEA, so we could go with another upholstery option although they all look kind of cheap, or we could get one of those fancy aftermarket covers they make in, I don’t know, New York City or something) or we could get a new couch. It sits just fine but it looks awful. The dog likes to lick it and would lick any new couch we got. I like having the loveseat-with-chaise because then we can both stretch out. I won’t have anything with a recliner because I don’t trust them with the cats. Before the Great Wedding Furniture Move we had a console table behind the couch to keep the couch from smacking into the wall, keep us from smacking our heads, get me closer to the couch to play video games, etc., but Mr. Z doesn’t like that because the chaise portion extends a bit into the doorway to the dining room.

  5. We’ve idly thought about switching the dining and living rooms, but then the dining room wouldn’t adjoin the kitchen, plus I don’t know where the couch and TV would go in the dining room that wouldn’t have a big glare problem. And then also you’d have to walk around the dining room table every single time you walked into the house.

Here’s furniture we are definitely not replacing and will definitely have in these two rooms:

TV
dining room table and chairs
china cabinet
coat rack
coffee table
lamps, etc

Furniture we may or not replace but which will exist in some format:

couch
TV stand
bar (currently have a wine rack furniture thing and a wine fridge that hasn’t worked in a year - we want to replace with a nifty little folding bar like this one)
side table (we need a much smaller one, I think - anybody have a link to a side table that’s only 12 inches wide?)

Furniture I have and like in the living room:

Small antique desk
IKEA Poang chair and footstool

Some pictures (unfortunately not including all the furniture, 'cause it’s all in the garage except what our friends moved for us before we got back that we knew we’d either need to live or we couldn’t move ourselves):

Couch in current position
To the right, the front door(usually under that mail rack with the key hooks I have a little drawer unit from IKEA that has, like, my running stuff and the dog’s leash and that sort of thing in it)
Next corner to the right
And to the right from there - this is where the TV lives, although we haven’t set it up since we got home - note the huge stand)

And into the dining room (sorry these are a little dark):
Kitchen door and big windows
To the right, china cabinet and door to hallway (ew, I forgot about the ugly chandelier - it would be nice to change that)
Again to the right, the wide doorway back to the living room
This last corner used to have my wine fridge

When I get to work and have a mouse I might be able to draw a rough layout. Any suggestions? We’d really appreciate it!

2

Welp, I’ll give it a shot. It’s hard to judge the size of objects and areas, so I can’t tell if this would work, but I’d put the TV on the wall where the couch currently resides, and put the bar under it. Then I’d put a smaller couch or a loveseat on the wall between the door and the fireplace, and then a separate chaise in the corner where the TV is, but angled toward the center of the room so it’s not obstructing the doorway too much.

Switching the rooms occurred to me, too. If you mounted the TV where the china cabinet is, you’d avoid the glare, and the couch would go along the window wall, with possibly another chair or chaise in other corner (where the light switch is). The china cabinet would pretty much have to go where the couch is, but it looks like it would fit. Yes, then you’d have to walk around the table, but right now, you’ve got it perpendicular to the dining room. If you turned it the long way, you might have a little more space on either side.

And in fact, even if you don’t swap the rooms, you might try turning the table the other way in the dining room, and see if you prefer that.

3

Can the bar double as the TV stand?

4

I would demo some of the brick on the f/p surround so the TV can be mounted above it. Cover the rest with smooth stucco and give it a little more character. You can position the A/V equipment on the side, and have the wires run through the wall to the back of the TV. Move the couch towards the middle of the room (a designer is always going to tell you not to hug the walls with your furniture).

5

But then wouldn’t we be walking right into the couch when we walk in the door? (Also, we are not demolishing any brick or doing major alterations to plaster walls, at least not at this time. That’s major house surgery.)

I mean, I know the designers all say “get the furniture off the walls” but sometimes it seems that’s the only place to put furniture!

The bar is not big enough to double as a TV stand (plus, we have a ton of stuff that should go under the TV - Blu-Ray player, Xbox, etc.) And we want the bar as a flat surface to do bar stuff as well.

Heart of Dorkness, we’d really rather not break up our couch and chaise 'cause we’re newlyweds still and like to snuggle and watch TV at the same time. Perhaps in five years when we can’t stand each other we’ll want separate seats. :slight_smile:

I’m trying to picture swinging the table around in my mind. Obviously we couldn’t do it without moving the china cabinet to a different wall, but then wouldn’t the head chair just be smack there in the doorway? We may have to experiment with this. (Of course, we never go STRAIGHT through the dining room because the door to the kitchen isn’t right in front of the door from the living room - in fact, none of them are in a straight line. So we’re always entering the dining room straight on and then going to the right to get to the rest of the house or ahead but to the left to get to the kitchen anyway.)

6

Here’s a diagram by the way (not to scale and with no measurements - I can’t find ANYTHING now, including my good measuring tape) - you can see that the doors aren’t in a straight line, regardless of the dining room table placement.

The only reason I’m concerned about putting the TV on the wall where the couch is now is glare from the windows on the screen, which might be a pretty big problem.

7

It looks to me like you have 2 options. Well, 3 but the third one is pretty bad.

  1. Move the tv above the fireplace and leave the couch where it is.
  2. Move the tv onto the wall behind the couch and move the couch in front of the fireplace facing the tv.
  3. Move the couch against the front door wall facing towards the dining room and mount the tv on a swinging stand on the wall where the couch is now. But then you’ll have to pull it out every time you want to see it.
8

Any idea how we could try out the viewing angle on the TV above the fireplace without ending up with the most embarassing “broke my TV” story since those people made Nintendo ship the Wii with wrist straps? (Duct tape?) If we end up putting up mounting hardware it’s gonna be a bitch to hide the holes if we don’t like it.

9

We mounted our tv above the fireplace. We got an adjustable bracket so that you can move it left, right, up and down. We rarely move it from its position of all the way back and centered.

That’s where I’d put it.

10

If you were on a television show, they’d whip up something like this in 15 minutes to cover your mantel, hide your cables and store your boxes AND media.

It actually might be worth investing in - you get the added bonus of having some wood to mount the mount to, instead of mounting the mount directly (and “permanently”) to the wall.

11

Now there’s an idea!

12

Get a friend and have hubby and friend hold the tv in place while you try out a bunch of positions on the couch.

13

That is… pretty amazing. Wonder what such a thing might cost? (We’d still have to see if we liked the TV position, of course, but my goodness what a cool idea.)

As you can see, somebody has already monkeyed with the original fireplace (no idea what it looked like but I’m pretty sure it was much more Craftsman-style to match the house.) So we have an ugly fireplace to start with.

14

Haven’t read the whole thread yet but…could you use the console table (sofa table) as your flatscreen stand?
And for the side table (don’t know how long you want it) just this weekend I saw an end table that was 1 square foot and had at least two shelves.

15

You could put the couch so it’s on the carpet, and it looks like there’s room to walk behind the couch. Right now you have to walk in front of it, and maybe trip over someone’s leg if there are people sitting on it.

I would just use a mock-up out of cardboard to see how the TV would work above the f/p. You can get a bracket that makes the TV lean forward for easier viewing.

16

It’s so clean!!!

17

HAHAHAHA! We just had the floors redone. This is what it looked like mid-frantic pre-wedding haul-everything-out-of-those-rooms. (On the plus side, I found my deck shoes!)

Does anybody have any advice about what to do with the actual couch, as in, recover, replace, what?

18

Since the seats are still in good shape, I’d keep it and either get a cover for it (one that fits nicely and won’t crease) or re-clothe* it. IME re-clothed sofas can get almost as much mileage post-fix as they got before.

  • I’m reasonably sure this is not the right word. I mean change the cloth of each cushion and of the body of the sofa individually, rather than getting a whole-sofa cover.
    ETA: stick aluminum foil to the cardboard mockup of the TV to see whether there is glare, and check it at different times.
19

Reupholster. And that’s not a “ph”, that’s just a “p” that happens to be next to an “h”, so it’s pronounced re-uh-POLE-ster (/ˌrēəpˈhōlstər, ˌrēəˈpōl-/).

20

Put the TV on a wall mounted bracket, like this one. You can adjust the tv tot your viewing angle and put it back again flat against the wall for company. Or pull it out and rotate it if you want to use it for games like the playstation move, that require a lot of space in front of the TV.
If you build a narrow ikea TV furniture around it, that’s the place where you put all of your balck boxes and wires and movies.