The Great Coffee Table Rotation

Earlier this week, I was talking about how my style has been shifting.  Shifting from a beachy, cottage, country farmhouse type vibe to a more sophisticated yet quirky Emily Henderson meets Nate Berkus style, and it feels soooooo right!  In the middle of this style shift I was hating on our living room.  Like, HATING hating on our living room.  It’s not terrible.  It just doesn’t have that “wow factor” that the dude on Storage Wars is always talking about.  So I did a little tweaking and I’m liking the results so far.

It boils down to a chair switch (moving the rehabbed $6 chair down to the living room), combining it with a Target poof, bringing a little brass planter in, adding some plants, the black and white IKEA pillow which brings tons of texture to the room, adding a dough bowl underneath the coffee table (one of my Brimfield finds), and…oh yeah…the topic of today’s post, that coffee table.  Recognize it?  Does this jog your memory?

Our “new” coffee table is the bench from our entryway that we built and stained.  It’s a bench that we made with some old framing lumber from our basement.

The old coffee table has always bugged me, along with the living room in general.  The whole thing has felt very disjointed and has affectionately become known as the room for misfit toys furniture.  In particular, the coffee table just never felt right.

This summer I read a fabulous book written by The Nester titled “It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect To Be Beautiful“.  If you haven’t read the book, you should.  It’s fabulous.  And will make you appreciate your home as is or tweak it within your lovely limitations.  There was one section that really spoke to me and my problems in my living room.  It was on the topic of quieting a space.  That when you’re stuck and something isn’t working, to declutter and remove all the knick knack stuff to help you determine exactly what is wrong with the room.  Was it my pillows?  The coffee table?  The postcards?  So I “quiet-ed-ish” my living room, removed some stuff, and let it percolate.

What I had originally thought of as a pillows-not-quite-working problem turned into the coffee-table-is-the-wrong-size problem.  The scale was definitely off.  Not that I’m a designer and really understand scale.  I’m not.  But the coffee table just felt too big.  It was always in our way and made maneuvering around the couch too difficult.

So out it came.  For the record, this is the kind of stuff I do when Colby is away on the road.  I move things around.  And in this instance, I spent some time shopping the house for something that would make a good coffee table.  I tried a couple of poufs, some baskets turned upside down, wooden crates, and then the bench from our entryway.

The second I dragged the bench into the living room the heavens parted, the angels sang, and an already great day turned gloriously more exciting.  Ignore the sloppy couch cushions.  Goose happened to see a squirrel.  The only issue we had with the bench-turned coffee table was its height.  Colby found it just a few inches too tall for optimal feet-on-coffee-table lounging.  Important consideration.  So we chopped off a few inches from each leg using a circular saw.

And naturally, styled it up using some accessories that I’ve been hoarding all summer.

The living room is still far from perfect but it’s starting to feel more beautiful and more us.  As for our exiled coffee table, don’t feel too bad about it.  It miraculously found its way to the Habitat For Humanity ReStore.  It was originally a $20 yard sale find so it wasn’t hard to let it go.

As for the next steps, we still have a floor refinish to tackle in the grand master plan.  But in the interim, I’m envisioning replacing the postcard ledges with some art, mixing up the pillows, and adding some sofa tables.  The lounge corner of the sofa is my reading nook of choice, which lacks evening lighting.  A sofa table/lamp combo would be divine!

Spoiler alert, we’ve already built the sofa tables and for the record, they are indeed divine.