Karen.iz, is your couch from Crate and Barrel? It looks exactly like my couch (same fabric). I also have it paired with a red chair. We have it in our family room and while I'm kind of ready for a new color palette (have had this furniture for 10 years), I have to say I absolutely love the sturdiness of the fabric on that couch. Four kids and three pets later, it is still in great condition. I'm thinking of keeping the couch as is and instead reupholstering my red chair, whose fabric was a nightmare from the outset despite being told it would wear well, with something in the green family. Do you still have that couch?

Apologies to the OP for going off on a tangent, but just thought it was funny to see my couch in someone else's house, and also paired with red chairs.

http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r148/bmh4796/IMG_1439_zpsf4000741.jpg

http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r148/bmh4796/IMG_1399_zps331becb8.jpg

Lovely rooms, all of you!

catmom, I love seeing your living room transformation - it is amazing what some paint and a vision for style can do!

Wow, you've all done terrific jobs! Karen, your windex bottle brought back memories of wiping doggy nose prints off windows right before a showing the last time we sold : )

Beagles, is your paint color grey? What's it called? And glad to see you and Karen also have dogs who think they're decorative accents!

Anele, I'm attaching a pic...be kind, I know it's awful but the previous color (this is after 2 coats of primer!) was much, much worse. We just purchased this small home, I'm living there to be closer to doctors after an overseas injury. My husband has returned to his posting in Europe. To make matters worse, the TBI I suffered caused tramatic color blindness and some memory loss. And it definitely doesn't help that I was a tomboy to start with and seem to have been born without the "Pink Girly Gene" which bestows that instinctive ability to decorate : p

Cat mom, wow! Your space doesn't classify as boxy or boring by any stretch of the imagination...but I'm glad you posted those pics!!! Maybe our next house?

Geokid, your space is really nice, I especially like the contrast between the walls and your furnishings.

Thanks for the pics, everyone...now I know what I'm shooting for!

I love your sofa Baroo2u! A gray wall color or maybe something in warmer tones would be nice. A friend of mine just painted her living room in a beautiful gray called Nimbus by Benjamin Moore. Another neutral light color that is really nice is Frappe by Ben Moore. It's very light but would add just enough warmth to your walls.
Sorry to hear about your injury. Hope your recovery will go well.

geokid, can you tell me more about your sofa? I love the lines of it! And we have had a tree stump in our garage since hurricane Irene waiting to become a table somewhere in our home.

Thank you, noellabella. The couch was the first piece of furniture my DH and I ever purchased. We bought it at Slumberland about seven years ago. It wasn't expensive by any stretch, but it has held up well to two young kids and our one year old lab. I'm not sure of the manufacturer but I can check when I get back in town.

I love my stump table. It's a tad too tall though, but it was a gift so it's a keeper no matter what. :) My BIL let it dry out thoroughly and then he used linseed oil.

Cat mom - Love, love, love!!
I liked all the rooms, not dissin' anyone!! But I LOVED the feel in Catmom's FR. KEWL.

Beautiful rooms! I'd love to see more!

Nice rooms everyone!

This is one side of my living room. I can't get the whole room in one picture.
It's a small, but cozy house!

This is the other side of the room.

I think you can make your room look very nice. First, you need something lower for your TV...my neck hurts just thinking about watching it. Either keep the TV where it is, or put it on a low console in front of the window.. Nice white drapes or sheers over your window and you need a table/lamp at the end of your sofa, a square area rug in front of your sofa and a small coffee table. I can't see what is behind you (when you took the picture) but is there room for an easy chair? Some art on the walls......colorful peices and a plant or two around will make it homey.

Living room in previous house - started with dark knotty paneling, heavy beams, dark Georgian shutters, and ho-hum brown floors:

Living room in current house - narrow rooms, ugly mantels, 11' ceilings, great old trim, and that wonderful bay window.

Looking toward the front of the house:

The other end, looking through to the dining room:
(The wall color is, in fact, the same - more evidence that light and photo exposure is everything!)

My living room/ family room is a decent size but it is a step down on 2 sides which is a little strange. I guess the good thing about that is that you do not have to walk through it to get to other parts of the house. The room faces north so I am glad it has the 2 skylights. The house is an 80's ranch with basically has no architectural character.
Here it is from one end:

And the other:

Baroo- that grey is awesome so much better than the green.

Bronwynsmom- what settings do you use to get such clear shots

Yipes. I don't know - I just point and shoot, and then I delete the ones that look wonky. It's a little Nikon Coolpix, and one day I really am going to read the documentation ... the only thing I do know is that it adjusts the aperture/exposure based on what it sees in the middle of the picture, so if I aim at something bright, the whole thing is darker.

Sorry to be such a dolt about it.

Yep gmaof3, I got the memo about the tall cabinet already : ) It's temporary until I can find a really spectacular console table. The house is sparsely furnished as all of our furniture is still overseas with my husband. I want to find a few really nice pieces, but the house is small, certainly not in the same league with the lovely homes everyone seems to be building now! I think we've been in europe too long, must've missed some housing revolution or something!

CL believe it or not that's just the primer! It was a little weird looking but I was so sick of the dark walls I used it anyway : p

I am very sorry to hear of your injury, but glad to hear you are getting treatment and wish you luck with a full recovery.

If you're sick of dark walls, you want something lighter? What about just a nice warm white? It would look great with your floors and sofa. We have BM Mascarpone in our home and I can really picture it in your room too. It has a nice soft glow to it.

Put on the paint and add some art and maybe a rug and you're all set!

Baroo2u the paint color is Sherwin Williams Tinsmith. It is a true gray with no weird undertones, we tried about 1,000 grays in order to find it. We used it throughout our whole house pretty much. More pics here, it is in the kitchen and great room as well.

I love seeing everyone's 'real life' rooms. Like the OP, I live in a house that is short on the traits that make rooms photograph well--I've got small windows, no trim or moldings, no fireplace or built-ins, just boxy rooms. It's nice to see how others struggle with and overcome these 'handicaps'.

Bronwynsmom Thanks I will try aiming at something darker to see if that helps.

B, your rooms always look so warm and inviting....I'm ready to walk right in and sit right down.

Our FR is open to the kitchen/bkfst nook so we use furnishings to help define the area.

I'm sure some of you have seen this before, but I thought I'd add it here since I meet the criteria of having a not so large space (about 14' W x 16' L), not so high ceilings (which are higher thanks (or, because it messed with the house, not thanks) to the prior owner who removed the lath/plaster to expose the nearly 200-year-old joists), and not a lot of light/windows (the house is an old row home in the city and faces west, so it's just a lot of afternoon sun, but I wanted a cozy, warm space).

But I do have a few strikes as far as the criteria in the OP are concerned because it does have some great architectural/aesthetic features: an amazing staircase (which is difficult to maneuver, but you get the handle of it quickly), original fireplace and mantel with "King of Prussia 'marble'" (now extinct) topper (still working, believe it or not), and the beams (again, a positive or negative depending on whose perspective you're looking at it from, although I love them with the look I was going for).

Enjoy, and please excuse the doorway going into the bathroom and the associated sanding, patching, and painting, and, in the case of the new (but 200 year old) reclaimed white pine threshold I had made, polyurethaning, that needs to be done from installing the new door. I had a 4" wider door put into the bathroom so that it's easier to move furniture in and out of the house (everything large must go though the bathroom window because those amazing stairs don't allow for it).

This post was edited by KevinMP on Sun, Mar 24, 13 at 9:53

Kevin, you are so good at furnishing a small space so that it looks complete but also easy to move through. These skinny city row houses are always a challenge. When was yours built?

My living room, thankfully, is open to the front hall, so I can spill out a little, and share at least the cubic feet of air, but the dining room is accessible from the hall only by a single door, and we opted to treat the space between the two rooms as an open wall rather than a passage.

And thank you, Annie - come on over!

Thanks, brownysmom. It means a lot to me coming from you. The front part was built in 1826 in what is commonly referred to in Philadelphia as a "trinity" (as the name suggests, based on "father, son, and the holy ghost," one for each upper floor). Originally, the basement held the kitchen (I wish mine still had the heart of pine floor down there that was there originally, but I'm sure it rotted long ago). Around the turn of the 20th century, the kitchen was added onto the back of the first floor. In the 1970-80's, a bathroom was finally added (above the kitchen, where my bathroom still is) along with a roof deck above it, and in the 1990's, the roof deck, which cantilevered over the bathroom, was converted into what is now my master bedroom. So it's been through a lot of changes, and what had been 750 square feet of upper living space (and 250 down stairs) is now 1250 square feet. But, unlike many of these houses, I have a "huge" backyard/brick patio: 15' x 15'.

This post was edited by KevinMP on Sun, Mar 24, 13 at 10:36

All these room are just lovely!... Bronwynsmom, I absolutely love your room with shutters on the bottom of the tall windows, the light streaming in there is just beautiful. I am on my way out of the door right now to buy paint for my bedroom... I'm going to branch out and paint it a color!... I decided on Behr's Torch Gold. It's a darker, yet soft gold. Seeing some of the gold tone rooms here has yet inspired me that I am making the right choice..

I'm loving ALL these rooms! I can't even tell which ones adhere to my desin challenge guidelines since everyone's done such a great job "thinking outside the boxy"

KevinMP, we've lived in a couple of old homes with those stairs, my GG visited one and exclaimed ecstatically "Oh look, you have suicide stairs!"
Beagles & Tinan, thanks for the paint suggestions! I'm pretty sure it'll be "light and airy" grey in the LR (per B'smom's suggestion, thank you!) & off white kitchen & hall. I'm collecting chips & my sisters are driving up this week to visit, sew curtains, indulge in exotic fruit juice cocktails and tell me which color to buy. Marscapone sounds delicious, and would bring back happy memories of spectacular meals in Italy : )

Dbfireswife, I know what you mean about gold rooms--we had a golden tan in our family room a few houses ago and it was so bright and warm. It was a color suggested to me for my LR, but grey's a safer choice given my color deficit. That doesn't stop me from living vicariously through people like you, .tho, so make sure you post pics of you r bdrm project!

Interesting, Kevin -
And very efficient in a cold climate.
Southern houses are often the reverse - the working class housing of the mid-19th century was often the shotgun shack, with the rooms laid one behind the other instead of piled up on top - and so named because you could fire a shotgun right straight through all the doors, from the front door to the back door.

Our city house was built in 1896, and is more the railroad variety, with all the rooms arranged one behind the other off a long straight hall, the main floor half a story above ground, and the ceilings high and the windows large to take advantage of the breezes and manage the heat.

baroo2u, I love your sofa! It is so lush! I too have a small home and although the Lr is actually a good size it has no wall space to speak of. It has two windows, a fireplace, and three double door entrances into it. My challange was trying to find a paint color that meshed with the rooms that abutted it for it needed to be the room which tied my many other colors together. I picked a medium grey and it works so well with my red dining room, red and grey is a lovely combo:).
Have fun decorating!
Here is my still unfinished room. It needs real accessories and proper lamps and shades.

Bronwynsmom, is the sofa/loveseat with its back to the dining room a tight back style? If so, would you mind sharing who makes it? We are in need of something with similar lines (two actually) if I don't go with four chairs instead..

Thanks. I apologize for the hijack. Love all these rooms!

Here is one end of our 'keeping room' that is at one end of our kitchen. I don't know how to post more than one photo, so I will add two others from other vantage points in the next posts.

From the kitchen

This post was edited by cyn427 on Sun, Mar 24, 13 at 13:24

Looking from the couch to the kitchen door...

Here is mine. It's decorated for Easter. The weather's kind of dreary, so the pictures aren't great.

Thank you, dbfirewife - I love those windows, too - except when I have to wash them. Yick.

Cyn, I made a new thread about your loveseat questions.

And cyn, your room is a lovely example of a sharply edited palette, and how refined and comfortable it can be.

Question: Why are my pictures upside down now on my laptop, but still look rightside up on my iPad? Being a techno-idiot, I have no clue. :)

Love looking at everyone's homes: Here are my two living areas

Thanks to the posters who complimented our FR! We are very happy with the way it turned out and really enjoy hanging out down there, watching TV with the fireplace going.

I popped in to reply--first chance I had after reading our comments, but It's too late for me to really look at the wonderful rooms posted since I posted mine. Mental note to savor them tomorrow!!!

Here's mine: a traditional room in a 1913 home:

We are all so fortunate, and it shows.
Nice puppydogs, too!

Here's mine. A pretty small space - punctuated by a lot of doors that go nowhere, double windows, the doorway to the kitchen...etc.

We are in the "plants and accessories" zone now and I am finding it challenging to find those "perfect little things" we are all looking for!

grlwprls, that's a lovely room. I really like your chairs, and your design assistants!

So much fun to see everyone's rooms...all so lovely and yet all so different! So much creativity!

Here's mine. This room isn't boxy, but traffic flow patterns have made it a little tricky to work with.

The little table next to the buffet will be relocated shortly. It's just not working in that spot.

And the black blob in front of the chair is the dog, not an ottoman :)

So many pretty rooms here.

Fourkids4us - it's an Ethan Allen couch. We moved it into my new house and I'm struggling with the dark color (see my thread about my "lifeless" living room.) Happily, I just went to EA and ordered a slipcover for it. :)

All these rooms are beautiful! Thanks for the inspiration!