Blue Cottage Decor: Our Living Room

Blue Cottage Decor: Our Living Room

After I wrote about Landon’s turquoise room, our kitchen and our powder room, it’s time to show you our living room.

You’ve seen parts of it in several posts, but I’ve never written a post about the whole room.

I’m a collector of many things, and they need to find a spot somewhere in the Blue Cottage. My milk glass collection and part of my bottle collection are displayed on this white cupboard. I took the two doors off and am thinking of repurposing them for a wall display in the office.

A lot of the prints I hung in our home are from my parents’ house and show landscapes in Germany.

I recently bought a lot of vintage spools from Etsy, and they add a nice touch of color.

I just adore this leather wing chair I found at Goodwill. I think I paid $23 for it, and it’s the most comfortable chair in the whole house.

The only thing that was wrong with it was that the cushion was torn a bit, so I just put a grain sack over it I had bought at a flea market during one of my last visits to Germany.

I bought this little ballerina music box at an antique store and she looks darling under the cloche, which I put on a tag sale milk glass cake stand.

I founds this little table at a crafts fair for $30. It was repainted with chalk paint and then distressed.

The last time I went to IKEA, I bought a bunch of these small planters for 49 cents and succulents, and put them all over the house.

This mirror is a recent purchase.

This little vintage jar with buttons and a vintage bird card is from a vendor at the Country Living Fair. I’m planning to sell similar jars in my Etsy store.

I can’t wait to find the time to paint our four dining chairs white with chalk paint and upholster the seats. I already found the fabric for just a few dollars.

I bought them years ago and I really like how short they are because it makes the room look bigger. I have a set of beautiful cane chairs, but they’d be too tall for our living room.

This sweet dresser with wheels is a tag sale find and the one I updated with wallpaper on the inside.

When I was in Colonial Williamsburg with Benjamin Moore I learned that furniture pieces had wheels back then because they were moved around every day depending on what was happening in the room.

People would move a table and chair in the middle of the room for lunch, for example, and then move them back against the wall to make space to do other things.

I’ve bought three vintage pieces of furniture with wheels, it’s kind of become a theme — remember my “linen closet”? — and I thought that was fascinating to learn.

We’ve had this Pier1 sofa since we lived in Los Angeles. I’m so looking forward to replacing it with something more stylish, but it’s large enough to sleep on and really lightweight, which made moving over the years so much easier.

I think I’ve mentioned this before: I’m not in a rush to get flat screen TVs, and our two old TVs don’t seem to want to die.

This vintage Pepsi crate is perfect for some of my small collectibles.

When I saw this lamp at Home Goods recently, it just had to come home with me. It’s a perfect addiction to my decoupaged table.

This is my favorite DIY project in our living room: $1 cotton dish towels on a tension rod are our curtains. They give us privacy but let in lots of light.

Since these pictures were taken, I’ve painted over the grapes on the drawer and side panels of this piece because I’ve never liked them. It looks so much better.

That print of a building in my hometown Bremen is a signed original I found at a tag sale. What a coincidence to find this all the way here in America.

I bought two of those stools at Target and am using one in the kitchen and the second like this as a plant stand. Both of the carpets also come from Target.

So this is our Blue Cottage living room. What do you think?

Would you change something? I’m thinking of painting the whole green “grape” cupboard white, should I?

{Most of these photos were taken by my friend, the talented Kelly Schwark}