Our living room- before

Today was a lovely spring day. I got to eat lunch with The Christopher, which is always fun during the work week (or weekend or all the time). We ate at the golf course and I had the most delicious California Croissant: turkey, avocado, sprouts, garlic mayonnaise, applewood smoked bacon and a buttery croissant. YUM! While we were spying on conversations around us telling each other about our mornings, Aaron said I looked like a mime. How charming. I told him I would go golf with the people on the course, which of course meant we both had to act out what a mime golfing would look like. I'm sure the patrons of the grill were amused with our goofy impersonations. My favorite was mime Aaron hitting the golf ball and throwing up the number four.

At the risk of sounding like a cat lady blogger, there's nothing cuter than holding a purring kitten while you type. I hold her like a baby and she paws at my face. This makes up for all of the things she knocks down in the middle of the night.

Now, on to design dilemmas. One thing I noticed immediately about our apartment was the awkward placement of certain things in the apartment. Take this picture for instance. We'll go from left to right.
1. Just to the right of the window you see the dark shadow cave on the other side of the fireplace. This hole is about two and a half feet wide long and two feet deep. It would make sense if it was a closet, but it's not. Instead it's a cavern. When my parents visited my dad added a shelving system, and when he had the boards cut we figured out that the hole wasn't square. It's wider in the front. So it's more like a trapezoid. DUMB. Anyway, this is how we've got the room set up now. You can see the tracking system for the shelves because I decided to wait until we've picked a paint color to paint the track. It's awful looking, so if we don't decide on a color soon, I'm going to get the maintenance to supply me paint that matches apartment beige we've got. Currently, the shelf is storing a lot of bowls. I seem to have an obsession with dishes that I didn't know about until I got home from the wedding and had around 20 serving bowls. What?!
Next in our photo tour we have the mantle that isn't. The mantelpiece is not level, as my contractor father identified when he sat something on it and it rolled off. :) I'm trying to figure out where I want the black frames, and am leaning toward putting them in our bedroom or in the guest bedroom/office "goffice." The complex lease consultant really wanted us to have our TV installed on the white thing, but The Christopher was opposed because it would hypothetically be uncomfortable/a strain on one's neck and eyes to watch a TV that was so high. I almost suspected him to then try for a larger TV, but that Christopher just doesn't spend money. Moving on to the angled wall. You will note that in the first picture you see a row of light switches and the TURBOCOP 9000 alarm system, but in the second picture I'm trying desperately to cover up the TURBOCOP 9000 with an Easter decoration. I hate that thing. Whoever built this complex had a complex himself, and could not deal with having walls without alarm systems, thermostats and awkwardly placed outlets.
And in this picture you'll see the Alamo, where we are currently housing the electronics. Please also pretend you don't see the junk on the coffee table or the boxes in the corner. Kthx. My biggest problem in trying to make a space for this room is the myriad elements we have going on. Things that are non-negotiable for the room are the brick-and-mortar aspects: the fireplace, the mantel, the weird cave-like hole, and the larger pieces of furniture, including the Alamo and our couches. Ideally, I wish I could get rid of the Alamo, put the TV over the mantel (even though I HATE the thought of having a TV as a focal point of the room, I also hate how much stuff we have in the room right now) and then reconfigure the couches. Below is the current (not to scale) diagram of what we have.


And this is something I like more.



It would free up a wall, which would be LOVELY since most we have very few, but we would also have to find a temporary home for the Alamo. Obviously this post is kind of pointless, but I thought it'd be interesting to put these thoughts down visually.

Here are some of my goals for this room:

• paint the walls. The picture doesn't show how yellow the tan paint is. I don't like it. I am thinking something grayish or blueish. Thoughts?
  
• Replace curtains with longer plain white drapes
• Get a real coffee table (the current one was $5, and it WORKS like a $5 coffee table. It is terribly shaky). The new coffee table doesn't necessarily have to be a table, though. I like the idea of using an old trunk or re-purposing something else as a coffee table.
  
• I've already moved "Keep Calm and Carry On" to my office, but I haven't framed the vintage Cape Cod map that I got last summer, which I want to go in the space where KCACO is currently.
  
• I am debating what color pillows to get. As you can see in the above pictures, I took all of the pillows we have right now off the couches so I could get a better idea. I am going between shades of blue, mostly turquoise or nautical but not themed. The toughest part of helping mold this room's identity is that it is an open floor plan right into the kitchen. Although I liked the sound of it before we moved in, in a room this small the lack of distinction between the places is difficult because whatever paint we choose has to work well both as a "living" and a "kitchen" paint.
• This area really is a blank slate. I'm not attached to any of the pillows or the drapes, which I had throughout my days in college, and we don't have any rugs or anything on the ground in the living space or the kitchen space.

Except for magnets on the fridge and a yellow KitchenAid stand mixer, the kitchen looks pretty much the same.

So, what do you think we should do? Do you have any inspiring ideas? Are you miraculously a good fairy decorator who wants to come and help me find stuff? I'd love to hear what you think!