Project!: Living Room and Dining Room

For the record, my blog’s namesake is not Project Runway.  My blog is named in honor of the 1995 hit Clueless, which had a major impact on my susceptible teenage brain.  I remember poring over the JC Penney catalog for plaid pleated skirts and sweater twinsets. GoFugYourself.com hit the nail on the head in this Wallace Shawn post: “It’s the first movie I ever walked out of with the reaction, “’That was hilarious! I need to go buy some clothes immediately.'” (One year later, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet proved an equally compelling call to action, but that time it was “That was sad. We need to go make out right now.”)

So, when I say “project!”, I’m channeling Cher Horowitz and her love of makeovers.  I was unable to find this scene on YouTube, which left me with no choice but to rent the DVD from Netflix, set up a tripod in front of our TV, and record this clip for you with my digital camera.

My favorite sort of project is one that I can tackle within a few days with little-to-no money spent. Our living room and dining room will not be that sort of project, but I’m looking forward to it all the same. Right now, it is a blank slate. It took some work getting it to this state – check out the wall colors before we moved in (please note: that’s the previous tenants’ stuff):

Yikes. It is now Behr’s Irish Mist, which is a very light gray. Here’s what I’m workin’ with:

(Never mind the headboard leaning up against the wall back there.)

Clean and spacious but also barren and flat. Suffice it to say there are long to-do and to-buy lists for this space. Both rugs will be replaced: the dark gray/blue one in the living room isn’t the right size and the brown one in the dining room is too brown. I’m waiting for the perfect colorful rug to appear in my Craigslist feed, and then I’ll let that guide the other decorative decisions. In the meantime, I have a steady stream of fabric samples arriving from Fabric.com:

The dining room and living room chairs will be reupholstered (by myself and by a professional, respectively). I’ll layer in more textiles with curtains and pillows and more textures with lamps (brass?) and side tables (glass?). A leather recliner will be added to the right of the couch and some sort of console table will be worked into the dining room. The light fixture above the table will be replaced. Plus mirrors and art and plants and lions and tigers and bears. There’s a lot to do.

Project!