This post chronicles the tale of how one tiny room with two walls got a makeover.  No furniture, budget, or marriage was harmed in the making of this room.

Here’s how our little dining room turned sitting room looked up until last week.  I realized it wasn’t working for us when one of our boys wanted to read to me and I asked him if he wanted to read in this room and the answer was a reluctant “I guess”.   We talked about the fact that this room didn’t feel very cozy and I asked him why he thought it was so uncozy.  He’s eight so he didn’t have some life changing advice but he simply stated that the red sofa room was cozier.  And he was right.

apparently, we live on Mercury

Here are a few things that made this room not work for us

1. Sofa placement

I feel like the natural place for the sofa in this room is on the long wall.  The room is tiny and only has two real walls, the window wall and the long wall.  But, the sofa was never inviting.  It never called out to us, begging us to rest our haunches on it.  I like rooms where the sofas speak to you {speak nice things, not rude things like “help me, somebody please put me out of my misery”}.  Normally, I wouldn’t put a sofa in front of a nice, big window but, I figured it was worth a try, I can always move it back.

2. Clutter

Granted,there’s not a huge amount of clutter, but accessories are my drug of choice.  I have a big problem with covering all surfaces with an abundance of accessories.  At the time this photo was taken, the coffee table had become a holding area for a bunch of loitering accessories.

3. The room has no purpose

I’m not sure I solved this problem.  We are very blessed to live in such a large home that we have rooms without a specific purpose.  It irks me when each room doesn’t have a task it needs to fulfil but, for now, being pretty and inviting are good goals.

First, I cleared out all the little junk.

Then I moved the sofa in front of the window and liked it.  But then I had a huge empty expanse of wall that needed anchoring.   So I pushed the thrift store dresser on the long wall.  Of course I moved the coffee table and rug.  And I clipped on some drapes I found at the thrift store.  They are too short but you can’t tell with the sofa in front of them.  I didn’t even bother to take the old mistreatments off {can you see them behind the blue ones?}  And for the record, the drapery color looks beautiful in real life, not purple or anything like it reads in this photo.

Here’s the feature wall.  When you wall into the front door and look to the right you see this wall first.  The dresser cost $80 and the shutters were $10 I think, you can find the rest of the room’s prices here.  I’ve had the lamp and white frames for years.  And you can look for a few of those accessories on ebay in the next week or so.  And no worries, I’m still trying to figure out what knobs to use.

The sofa works really well on the window wall.  When you sit there it is so cozy and you don’t have that exposed feeling like you did when it was on the other wall. Here’s a little trick I’m not sure we’ve talked about before–I like to use a bed pillow in a pretty sham on my sofas.  I love the texture of this one.

This is the one I use on the toile sofa.  When we watch movies, everyone fights over who gets the big pillow.

Ultimately, the room is a work in progress, just like the rest of the house.  But, now we actually like being in there and I love looking at it.  Plus, the dresser is great storage for books {but I don’t use it for that, it’s packed with…accessories!}.