Re-Vamp your living room in one weekend

About this time last year, my idea to get rid of the carpet turned into a complete re-design of our living room. I hated the cream carpet that we had inherited when we moved into our little maisonette 5 years ago. It was stained and just made the whole room look dirty. Between us (my husband and I) we managed to completely re-design the room in one weekend and on a relatively low budget,

The Floor
The first thing to go, obviously was the hideous carpet. I loved the idea of painted floorboards so the next thing we did was hire a floor sander for the weekend. That is never something I would like to do again though. It was very hard graft especially for my husband who did most of it! You have to make sure every nail in the floorboards are hammered in otherwise they will rip the sheet of sandpaper to shreds, and they are not cheap. After the sanding was done it needed a good clean before we could paint it. We primed it first then gave it 2 layers of white floor paint.



The Walls
We wanted to brighten up the whole room so we painted every wall bar one in brilliant white. It gave us, in effect, a blank canvas to work with. The wall that the fire place was on we painted in a bright blue and then we painted the timber fire surround in white which looks fabulous against the strong feature colour.



Furniture & Accessories
The Saturday was mainly taken up with decorating but Sunday was shopping day! We gave the floor one more coat then hit the shops. We already had a brown leather armchair and an Ikea sofa. Although the sofa had seen better days we knew our budget could not stretch to a new one, until we found a gem of a bargain in a second hand shop in Exeter - a green chesterfield sofa. We both looked at it and fell in love knowing it would look amazing in our new ‘white box’. I tentatively turned over the price ticket to find it was only £185! We snapped it up!




In the corner of the room we had one of those tall cheap bookcases that most students have. Because my husband brings home several books a week there was never enough room for them and it always looked messy. So I banished most of the books out of the room and cut down the bookcase so it was only 2 shelves high, painted it white and used the top of it to place a table lamp and to display our red telephone. (It is also a handy height to place a cup of tea and a pack of biscuits while sitting in the armchair). Building a bookcase for the banished books in the hallway became another weekend project.



Other things we bought on our shopping trip was a white bathroom unit which we used as a lamp table, a gorgeous rag rug which was also a bargain at only £50. (We have to fold it into a quarter of the size as it’s so big!). We bought brightly coloured cushions and a bright green lamp. We found that any bright colours worked really well in our white box.

The latest addition to our living which I have only just completed is our photo wall. Over the last year we have been collecting a variety of different photo frames, mainly from TX Maxx of all places. I printed out the photos on our printer and laid all the frames on the floor until I was happy with the layout.

In total we spent less than £500 re-vamping our living room and one weekend of hard graft.



Get The Look: Tips and Tricks:
1. Floor sander can be hired from Brandons.
2. The white floor paint is available from any DIY store, we got ours from B&Q
3. Paint one wall in a strong feature colour. You can change the colour whenever you want if you fancy a change, and there’s only one wall to do!
4. Create a photo wall with an eclectic mix of frames. Look in charity shops and recycling centres to get them cheaply.
5. Why not paint your existing pieces of furniture to give them a new lease of life rather than buy new.
6. Scour your local secondhand furniture shops. You never know what unique bargains you might find.
7. Search handmade websites like Folksy and Etsy for find unique handmade home accessories. Here are a couple of my finds (clicks photos to view other products):