Living Analog’s Living Room – 4th paint color is the charm

I’m a little overdue in sharing some “after” pictures of a do-over on the fireplace and our accent wall. (Maybe it was because I spent all last week ranting and raving. Sorry about that.)  So as a reminder, we started here:

White accent wall and dirty, stained concrete fireplace.

Then came a can of off-the-shelf white garage floor paint from Home Depot and a can of Behr Paint & Primer color matched to Sherwin Williams Urbane Bronze.

Urbane Bronze is the darkest member of Amazing Gray’s color family (all the other walls are Amazing Gray).  Since they share a similar base color, they blend well together.  Although if I had all the time in the world, I might consider painting all the Amazing Gray walls to be Shoji White (the color that used to be the accent wall which is two steps lighter than Amazing Gray in the same color family).  Having your colors be “related” can make a big difference in your home.  They work together effortlessly, e.g. with no effort on my part in picking from the whole big box of colors — I can just go to one strip on my fan deck and – voila – done!

Since I had the camera out and I’m about to reshuffle everything in the whole damn house around, I thought I’d take a minute and do a “snapshot in time” of the living room and dining room.  For our tiny bungalow of a house, we actually have a fairly open floor plan with the living room and dining room joined together.

The Value Village doesn’t-fit-in-the-car-debacle chair is currently hanging out in the living room as well.  Our house is about to explode with all the stuff I have crammed into it for the Green Shag Parking Lot Sale (October 20th!!). 

I gave the chair a good scrub-down with some rubber and vinyl cleaner we have for the Fairlane and then went after the legs with the Simple Green stainless steel spray and some aluminum foil.  That has been my secret go-to for getting chrome to shine up nice and get rid of age/rust/dust/miscellaneous spots.

He looks better, no? Well everything looks better with a (faux) sheepskin on it, especially now that fall’s chilly weather has arrived.  Next to Paul (our Paul McCobb secretary turned bar) you will see one of my I’m-a-lucky-girl birthday gifts.  My father-in-law and his wife now live in Eureka so we sometimes hit the Eureka Antique Mall together.  They remembered how I fawned over this cool bullet-esque planter but resisted pulling the  trigger for fear of becoming a crazy plant hoarder.  When we were at Home Depot picking up paint, I added a Draconae (?) plant to the cart but haven’t had a chance to pot him up all the way.  (As a side note, I’m not sure why there’s an eery green light in the hallway in that picture above.  Husband was working on his guitars in the music room so maybe he did it).

I also have another little before and after of the dogs’ storage — before it was a large woven basket we kept under the orange vinyl sofa.  It was hard for the dogs to get to their bone stash and the woven basket was a magnet for dog hair.  I picked up the white plastic one at Target, purged out a few of the toys they don’t like anymore and moved it over under the black chair.  Sometimes it’s the smallest little “tweaks” that can make a big difference.

Speaking of dogs, where are they?  Oh, just relaxing on the sofa while I take photos.

Lazy bums.  And for documentation sake, here’s one more of all the clutter that lives on the wall behind the sofa:

The floating shelves are not really styled right now, they are mainly filled with all the things I took off the mantel and moved about willy-nilly.  Since the whole room is about to get moved around willy-nilly, I didn’t really mess with them. 

So  that’s the living room and dining room as it stands right now.  And yes, if you look carefully you can see that one of the Hans Wenger-ish rope chairs has had its seat de-roped.  It’s a snapshot in time, a snapshot of how we sometimes live with half-finished projects until the time rolls around that they can be completed . . . a nice dose of reality — the Living Analog living room will never be quite “done” but I’m starting to like where it’s headed. 

Cheers – CT