Rearranging

Long-term dreams for our living spaces

Last Friday, we woke up to sunshine and the day ahead of us, no plans until supper at my parents’ house. I made a batch of Martha White chocolate chip muffins – with heavy cream instead of milk, my favorite trick for boxed pastries – and a pot of coffee, and afterwards, we moseyed into the library, all in our pajamas, all happy to do nothing all day.

Earlier last week, I had come across a French blue gingham couch from Ballard Designs, the perfect sized sectional that I could just see my babies piled together on. Of course, spending that money unnecessarily right now isn’t quite justifiable, so I layered my favorite linen quilt on the back of the couch we’ve had since I graduated college and called it a day. Enough change to satisfy my dreaming for at least a little while.

As we sat in the library on Friday, however, Kit flipping through her copy of Cinderella and Annie curled up with Price in his recliner, I asked him, “If we were just moving in today, how would you arrange this room?” And all of a sudden, our day was filled with purpose, with a job to do: tear apart our house and put it back together again, all because of a tiny inkling of a feeling I had that our current living area didn’t work for me anymore, or that nothing felt truly designed anymore.

So I stayed in my pajamas and pointed and admired and contemplated as Price moved shelves and leather recliners and couches and chairs around. I followed him with a vacuum, claiming this was good regardless of if we ended up moving everything back, purely due to the fact I was able to dust places we hadn’t seen since we moved in over two years ago.

Our primary focus was on the library, the room we spend the most time in and always have. Since moving in, this room held my beloved chair-and-a-half, Price’s beloved leather recliner, an old broken (and gray…) Homegoods wingback chair, one of the greatest antique market finds – a $100 pie cabinet, and Annie’s crate tucked behind my chair, the biggest eye sore of all. The television has lived on the mantle, anchored by the ugliest, most humongous stand I’ve ever seen in my life, and while books and dried hydrangeas have absolutely helped the situation, I always felt we weren’t doing the mantle justice by sticking a clunky TV on top. I had seen Camille Alexandra, a San Diego based interior designer (@camillealexandrainteriors on Instagram) put hers in a bookshelf, and so I thought, why not try! And wouldn’t you know…it fit perfectly.

We moved the couch into the library, up against the window, framed by the pie cabinet and an estate sale nightstand. Then moved one of our seersucker accent chairs into the corner by the bookshelf and brought home a precious chaise lounge in need of reupholstering to nestle beside the fireplace. The room, while not quite finished, feels open and better utilized. The mantle, while not styled yet, already feels appreciated, prettier, even with nothing designed. Every morning, I’m excited to come and turn on the lamps, sit in the morning light spilling through the window, and every night, I’m excited to come sit in the lamplight even for just a minute. I keep thinking to myself, why didn’t we think of this before?

Well, probably because it leaves the living room in shambles, for lack of a better word. Right now, our library chairs are living in there, along with an entirely too large upholstered circle ottoman I stole from my childhood bedroom as a solution to Kit hurting herself too much on our wooden coffee table. Nothing feels good in there anymore, but rather, it feels foreign instead. And that’s what I wrote in my journal this morning, this other, more dramatic side of rearranging, the feeling of homesickness for the way I had things originally. I wrote about how this might not have been the best time for me to move every single thing around in the tiny world I exist in these days, my home, given my tiny world is about to grow by an entire little human, our routines, our mornings, our family completely altered. I’ve been thinking about when we brought Kit home, how much comfort I found in returning to a place I knew so well, how much heartache I felt to come home and realize we had just finished the last season of a show we’d been watching for months. It’s silly, the things that bring comfort and the things that bring hardship in those first few weeks after having a baby. I’m not sure what will be the same and what will be different with baby boy than with Kit, but I anticipate the comfort of home will be the same, as it always, always is.

As I write this, though, Price and Annie piled onto the library couch with me, watching an interior design show on HBO as I type, I love this room, feel so comforted by it. I am thinking of late nights with baby boy, those nights that last too long and I need somewhere to go, away from Kit’s room next door to ours. I know I’ll find solace and warmth in here, with the golden sconces and TV in the bookshelf. The living room can wait…as long as my library feels like home.

This understanding of and belief in long-term interior design doesn’t stop my mind from racing with ideas all day long, though. I keep finding myself just sitting in the living room, mentally moving furniture around, imagining smaller dining tables or a printed couch, new window treatments or a way to get that mantle free of technology, too. While Kit naps, I scroll Facebook Marketplace, then go stand in that room and imagine again, wonder if I could ever get over the fact I spent $65 on a couch to reupholster…why did it only cost $65? A question I don’t think I’d ever truly be able to move past enough to actually purchase it.

I’ve settled on the truth that this room is a hard room to design, given we’ve split it to make space for a makeshift dining room, as the library was originally intended to be one. Price hit the nail on the head when he said the struggle is that there isn’t any anchor to that living area, it all exists in front of the fireplace, with no walls or corners to nestle things upon. So I’m thinking we’ll revert back to how we originally had it: a couch with two chairs across, an upholstered ottoman in the middle. My dream is a room of texture and pattern play, ginghams and florals and plaid. Curtains to tie in the library, the color of parchment and pops of red, French blues, rich greens, wicker and family pictures. My first step might be purchasing a pile of fabric off of eBay, the same we are using to reupholster the chaise lounge in the library, and kindly asking my mother to make new curtains. Then scour sales and save my money until I can order a patterned couch, preferably one from Green Row, a dream of mine.

In the meantime, the beautiful fabric we ordered to reupholster our chaise comes in today, privacy bamboo roman shades for the library arrive tomorrow, and we’ll be well on our way to settling the library into a form of completion, ready for a baby boy to come home to in just mere days.

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I made a list of all the dream products I’m using/would love to use as I slowly redesign this half of my house. You can peruse my inspiration here!