simplefrills: Makin plans, Living Room Style

Yep, more plans.

I just can't quit.

Y'all know I got a few to-dos checked off my looooooonnnnngggg list last weekend (what up, curb appeal and yet-to-be-posted-coffee table!)

Now that my to-do list is shortened by a few items, my natural instinct is to load it back up again.

Seriously, I need to be stopped.

Did you see the first to-do under the living room list? That's what I'm chatting about today. For a while now, I've been eyeing up my options at RugsUSA looking for the perfect BIG area rug for our living room. It's actually a relatively large space considering the size of our house, so a small rug just wasn't cutting it anymore. Style-wise, at least.

So I surfed. I surfed and I surfed and I surfed until I found the rug I was looking for. And the winner (hopefully) is....

This delicious chevron/ikat combination was just what I was looking for! I love the blue color and the fact that it is a large-print pattern so as not to be too distracting. Bonus, it has a tight, low pile so it will be easy to vacuum!! My Fitz fur-hating, vacuum-loving self is so VERY appreciative.

Once it gets to the house, I'll just have to lay it out to make sure that it is as good in person as it is in my dreams. I have high hopes that it will be just right.

Now, being the home decor blog-stalker that I am, I have always wanted to create a design board (virtually) to help figure out what colors, patterns and specific pieces would go best in a room design. This was the perfect opportunity! I'm going to give a brief walk-through of how my board came to be...so here it is!

My living room design board was actually created during the rug-choosing process to help me figure out which patterns and colors looked best with our existing couches and the coffee table I love. It was a huge help to be able to slap the picture of a rug I was considering onto the board and instantly know if it was a contender or not. I got really into it. Like War-of-the-Rugs style.

I made mine in Photoshop, but you can easily do the same thing in Word, Powerpoint or another processing application.

My board started by opening a blank document and pasting in a picture of our current couch, bookshelves and 3-shade lamp. I knew that these were all pieces that I wanted to reuse in the room as they are fully functional and I could style them to fit whatever "statement" pieces I decided on. I removed the background of the images using the "background eraser" tool. (The same effect can be done in Word by choosing the "picture" tab and then using "remove background")

Next is the fun part - searching for the new items to add to the board!

The pillows were the first things that I looked for - I knew I wanted to add some bright, fun colors in a way that would be easily and relatively cheaply changeable in the future. Pillows are a great way to do that! Since I don't want to spend a ton of money on new pillows, the ones I found were actually pillow covers that I can put right over our existing pillows. More cha-ching to spend on other things! Whoop Whoop!

Then I perused the interwebs based on those beautiful pillows that I found to add some more color, texture, and overall awesomeness to the board.

And that's it! It's easy and SO much fun to make these boards. I already have one started for my craft room...and a few others as well :)