I have a confession. My name’s Michelle, and my husband and I have been living in a new Barratt’s home for over three and a half years now. Until last week, it was still magnolia. The whole thing.
In my defence, we selected some pretty awesome statement pieces to counteract the magnolia when we first moved in. As we were advised not to paint immediately, due to nail pops and the house settling in general, we thought we’d get creative in other ways. Like this cool red Kulla light from Ikea in the living room, and this lovely yellow four poster Hemnes bed, also from Ikea. You’ll notice a theme.
Anyway, we’ve recently decided to dust off the old overalls, get our fingers out (neither of which I mean literally), and make some changes.
We went a bit mad with paint tester pots to start with. Luckily, we live two minutes from a Wickes store and they were on offer at buy one get one free, otherwise we may have been forced to rein it in a bit.
We couldn’t even decide where we were going to paint to begin with, so we bought six tiny pots for our bedroom and four for the living room. All of which were splodged across the walls. I have a strong feeling we’ll have to live with it in our room for quite some time.
Anyway, we decided to go with the living room first. Bear in mind that when we last decorated everything was when we moved here in June 2009. As you can see above, for our living room as was, we’d gone with the standard magnolia walls, cream carpet (I’ll assume you’ll take this as a given for any other room I discuss), with red, black and grey highlights. I like to think that people don’t notice we haven’t painted anything until now, as we chose our rooms’ contents very carefully.
When we first moved, our first choice was our lovely corner sofa from DFS, which unbelievably, we got on sale. Pretty much everything else in the room was from Ikea, including a six seater dining table and bookcases for our TV and DVDs.
We’ve moved away from the black/red combo now, and have decided on a much more classic feel for the living room, although we’re keeping the current sofa and dining set.
The first items I chose, which seem to have set the mood for the room, were some lovely lights from Argos. This review by Bobby from Yorkshire (scroll to the bottom) sealed the deal to be honest. As no one Argos in the area seemed to have two, my other half had to trail around Leeds one day picking the pair up from opposite ends of the city, but they’re worth it!
