Y’all, I’m so excited to share our sitting room with you today! This room and the adjoining playroom were so tricky – it took us the majority of our two years in this house to figure out how we should actually use this space.
You’ll recall our new sitting room was staged as a formal dining room when we bought our house. Turns out that wasn’t what our family of four needed at this phase in our lives. Here’s a look at the old dining room…
And here is almost the exact same view today!
Oh my goodness, you would not believe how much we use this space now! It’s the perfect spot to sit and watch our girls play. After we moved our couch back down to the den, we were left with the rug and dark brown chair and a bunch of blank walls. We tossed around the idea of adding a sectional sofa on the far wall but decided to try different layouts using pieces we already owned. I’m so glad we did, because this arrangement feels so cozy and homey and includes most of my very favorite furniture in the whole house!
The two cream chairs under the window were given to us back in Arkansas when my grandpa passed away and my grandma needed to downsize. They’re not lounge chairs by any means, but they’re the perfect balance of comfort and firmness you want in a casual sit-and-chat kind of chair. We replaced the old blinds on the large window with the same roller shade as in the playroom for a cohesive look.
One of my favorite parts of the room is our wall of black and white family photos. Some of the pictures are very old and some are much more recent, but they’re all special for one reason or another. Years ago, I spent hours refinishing the mid-century credenza beneath, and it has become a great storage space for seasonal kitchen items and art supplies.
Our vintage rocker and ottoman that Stephen found on Craigslist back in Arkansas are still going strong. This chair is the perfect amount of broken-in and is the most coveted seat in the house by both parents and toddlers alike!
In this photo you can see a few of our favorite things beneath my grandparents’ wedding portrait. They were so young!
Here is another treasured photo; a snapshot of my dad as a baby with his older sister and their mom in the 1950s.
This cute little pottery pig (he’s actually a salt shaker) was an antique store find on one of our first trips as a married couple. I wrote about that black and white DIY cross-stitch project here.
Here’s another view of those awesome mid-century chairs. You might have noticed the wall behind these chairs has been painted and the one behind the credenza is still the original tan color. These chairs are along the same wall as our new storage unit in the playroom, but the other wall goes all the way up to the vaulted ceiling and we’ve concluded we’ll need scaffolding to be able to paint it! When we rent or buy scaffolding to tackle that project, I’m super excited to replace the dining chandelier in this room with this simple pendant light (it’s already here and waiting in the basement!).
I talked a little about that vintage end table in my last post. I brought out a couple favorite books, a beautiful handmade walnut bowl, a candle, and a thrifted lamp with new shade (this is my favorite shade for updating old lamps). The bowl was a housewarming gift years ago. I recently gave my sister-in-law this similar bowl, complete with adorable gold fox & hare inlays. She loved it!
I’m so happy we thought outside the box and created a room to suit our family and our lifestyle right now. Instead of a bulky dining set, now we get to look at this when we’re building block towers in the playroom with our girls. And now there are plenty of comfy seating options when they’re content playing on their own and we do get a chance to relax!
What do you think of our finished sitting room?
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