Flat improvements - The lounge

When we moved in, Dave and I knew that the first room we would have to work on was the lounge. This is where we are sharing good times with our friends and where we hang out every week-end together. Dave wanted to display his guitars and I wanted books and various items on the build-in shelves.  For a while, we had been living with the below setting:

It looked kind of old but people always found it warm and welcoming, which we were proud of. However, we knew we wanted to get rid of the olf dark green sofa and put more colours in the room. For the last month, we have been making a few changes that I wanted to share with you step by step. So here we go!

One afternoon, after a vintage market, I decided to change the pictures in the frame. It was a slight change but while I was doing that, I realized that I HAD to change the colour of the shelves too. Because we are renting our flat, we could not paint the shelves directly, let alone the back-wall. But sure I could create a wall-paper, I thought! With a bit of colored paper and original masking-tape, we managed to change the shelves into a lovely bright blue nest. It only took me about 1 hour, to create long sheets of paper that would not damage the wall but would look ace giving depth and charm to the shelves. Here is the result! I am pretty satisfied of it! Also, organising the books by colours made me seriously smile!

I think this idea is great and I am already looking forward to hunt for funky real wallpaper to replace this one when we will need a change. The advantage of masking tape is that this is very easy to take off the wall and it doesn’t leave any stains. I have used it in my room as well to create a cool frame around a nice picture I found in John Lewis. I took this idea from a website at the time, but I can’t seem to find it anymore… I’d love to give credits back to the lovely person who had this ingenious idea though!

Next episode: the sofa! We managed to find a sofa we both loved, wouhou!!
After going through the lounge displays of Ikea, we found a black lounge table but we could not make up our mind on the same sofa. Price was also an issue. We thought we should leave it for a while and start looking in other places instead of taking an impulsive decision. When we got home, we took a look on Gumtree and there it was! The perfect green sofa, with only one arm but a deep flashy colour that would put great light in the room. We went to pick it up at a hair salon in New Town, we hired a van to bring it back home and carry it to the third floor. After only an hour and all those efforts, here it was, our new lounge!

I love spending time on the new sofa and the large table is ideal when Dave and I both want to use it. There is space for everyone! It really feels like a living welcoming space. What do you think?