House Tour: Pre-reno Living Room

Welcome to our living room!  Maybe our favorite room in the house, it is defined by the the floor to ceiling bay window that makes the room bright and inviting. The windows really make the room. In fact, we're lucky they are so old because the floor to ceiling length is grandfathered in.  You'll notice they extend all the way down to a few inches above the floor - in our more enlightented times, the building code stops building windows from extending that low for safety reasons (what if someone kicked the glass? what if someone fell out of the window? nanny state, amirite?).  

Because of the age of the windows they are single-paned. As we are finding out, they are not the most energy efficient, but on the plus-side, we can hear conversations from the sidewalk in our living room!

If you're wondering about the ugly grey rectangle with holes above the radiator, let us assure you that it was all part of our current design concept (that counts as shaggy chic, right?).  A huge shelf used to be there that jutted out into the room at eye level and took up a lot of visual space. Although what remains is an eye sore, trust us when we tell you that removing it right away was actually a great improvement.

You may be asking yourself, what is up with the big white spot on the wall above the fireplace (I know we certainly did), and why would this blog share a picture of some odd shelf above the living room doorway?  Well, previous tenants saw fit to put a projector over the door and hold movie nights displayed over the fireplace. After much discussion, we may be going in a different direction for our own entertainment needs. For now, however, the projector shelf stays.

Finally, the other side of the room - the one we don't focus on that often because it is just a big, blank wall. Behind the wall is the stair case and beyond that, the kitchen. As it is right now, the wall just serves to cut the living room off from the rest of the house and it has got to go. We are exploring ways to open up the space to give it a more modern feel while still maintaining the room's definition. 

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That's all for this week folks! J&K