Apartment Therapy: Tricks to Revive Your Living Room Decor

February 1, 2018

I’ll be the first one to tell you….I do not really like our apartment. It only gets sunlight from one side, which means the lighting is always weird, the kitchen has the ugliest cabinets and countertops, and don’t even get me started on the carpet. I dream of hardwood floors someday, but for now, I have to make do with our less than dreamy living space. There’s really not much choice when you’ve got rent control in an awesome area, so, the only solution is to do what you can to decorate your place as well as you can. Nate and I have really been making an effort in the last couple months to transform our apartment to a home we really enjoy spending time in. Up until this point, our decor has been a mish-mash of pieces we brought into our relationship, but now that we are getting married, we are making this house a home baby! I hope you enjoy the posts to come, we are doing a lot to our home and I’m here to show you all all my affordable finds and how I revamp old pieces to make them like new.

Our first priority was the living room decor. Remember what I said about those carpets I hate? Yeah. They weren’t even good looking when they were brand new, so imagine how they look about 4 years later…not great! Aside from ripping them out and laying down hardwood myself (trust me, I’ve thought about it, but no way no how am I investing money in something I don’t own!) something had to be done. I mean, look at this before picture:

The other issue at work here is the fact that our sofa and the carpet are very similar colors, so the entire combination just looks drab. You can see I was trying with the throw pillows, but this room just needed some life, am I right? I’ll tell you right now…if your living room decor needs a spruce up, there’s one thing you can do very easily that will give instant life to your room….get an area rug! This is so key, especially if you’re in a similar, less than ideal apartment situation like I am. I teamed up with Home Dynamix, and found this gorgeous Nicole Miller Home rug. They seriously have so many gorgeous rugs to choose from, and at prices that are pretty hard to pass up. Check out what the room looks like after the addition of an area rug:

Instantly better, am I right? The key here was to get a rug that was light and bright, which helps to bring up the mood in the room. The addition of the pattern also helps to bring in another bit of flavor and texture to the living room decor mix as well. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. At least when I’m sitting on the couch, I can pretend like I have pretty white carpets, right?!