Our soon to be living space is currently a frustration of mine.  The room itself is beautifully finished and an absolutely dream.  My dissatisfaction stems from the fact that I’d like to completely start from scratch with furniture and accessories but, understandably, can not.  This leaves me living with a much more “collected” look than I would prefer for this room.

Ideally I would opt for a more streamlined neutral look with some modern, natural and high end touches thrown in than what I’m going to be living with.  Keeping that in mind, I’ve tried to find images that blend together my dream with my reality in hopes of inspiring myself to focus on solutions rather than on problems.

My initial plan of attack for our living space is to begin with the basics that we do have and re-purpose them to give them new life and hopefully lend to my image a bit better than they currently do.  At the same time I’m on the lookout for inexpensive upgrades and DIY’s that I can tackle to add in the elements that we are missing.

This space combines our existing elements of graphic art, a traditional couch and a sheepskin with easy upgrades of lighter pillow cases, greenery and a metallic.

To our great disappointment, we are losing two nine-foot floor to ceiling built-ins with this move.  I’ve selected an industrial-looking shelving unit to house some of our items currently on display, but sadly most will not make the cut.  Since we are going to be drastically paring down, I am gathering a lot of inspiration from these neutral, styled shelves.  I am leaning towards storing our more colorful books for the time being in order to achieve a similar look.

A very “unique” challenge (I’m referring to it as such in an attempt to make it feel like a fun problem to solve rather than a glaring eyesore) in our living room is our inherited coffee table.  Once upon a time, maybe in the early ’80’s, this coffee table was saweeeet!  It was nicely finished, gigantic and has a swanky top that raises up to provide a “table top” at the couch.  Fast forward the entire duration of my life to today and this relic’s finish has been destroyed, it’s still just as massive and it still has the swanky top/desk which is actually useful when one is trying to work in the living room.  (One point for the coffee table!)  I have attempted to replace this monstrosity but our roommate is inexplicably attached to it and refuses.  Now this beast is moving into a shiny, gorgeous new apartment and is literally going to be the elephant in the room.  Yaaaaay.  That was a very roundabout explanation as to why I am currently obsessed with coffee table styling.  I have to do whatever I can to disguise the monster.

Trays, books, accessories, I’ll try it all!

I am going to conclude today’s dose of inspiration with an eye on the fireplace.  Oh yes, we have a fireplace.  In Los Angeles.  Sometimes we turn it on because it looks pretty but it is a completely pointless feature.  Never the less, a bare mantle must be styled!  We are 95% settled on the photograph that is going to be either sitting on the mantle or hanging directly above it, but I’d like to compliment it with some muted accessories like those seen below.

After giving this post some thought, compiling photos and sharing my plan I actually feel a bit better about the journey to perfection that our new living space is going to embark on.  We aren’t that far off and it’s important to have an ideal to work towards.  Can you say #homegoals?