Before and after: sitting room

More for my own benefit, as a record, than for anyone's else's, these are pictures of my more-or-less finished sitting room/living room/lounge, whatever you like to call it. 

It has turned out vastly different from anywhere else I've ever decorated. I've never been bold enough to have a coloured wall before, always stuck to light neutrals. This room, however, being long and thin, seemed to need 'pulling in' a little. I found painting it a bit scary! It looked patchy after the first coat and I was panicking but, after two coats, it dried smoothly and is fine. The armchairs, TV, side tables, mirror and artwork came with me. At my last house I had fitted bookshelves so there wasn't much storage to bring. 

It has all kind of evolved. I chose the sofa first, loved the colour. The mid-century sideboard is on loan from my daughter, so then I searched for a mid-century storage cabinet and found the vintage G-Plan glass-fronted one in a local antiques mill. Then I went looking for a drop-leaf dining table... and my sister told me she still had my mother's stored in her garage. That was a surprise as I thought we'd got rid of it years ago, after mum died. Anyway, I'm delighted to have it, a little gift from my mum, and it is just right for the space under the mirror. Once I'd got rid of the spiders (!), it polished up a treat. (I haven't yet decided whether to keep the much smaller drop-leaf table, which was a cheap stop-gap when I first moved in. It currently provides a reasonable stand for the broadband hub, so it's staying for now.) 

The curtains are a confession... I had some others made, which were the right colours for the decor and really very nice - but once they were hung I hated them! 😱 They just looked really 'meh', boring and too elegant really, a bit brocadey. They made the furniture look like 'old brown furniture'. I'd bought a metre of patterned fabric to recover a shoe bench in the hall, and a piece of it was left lying in the sitting room. One day I walked in and suddenly realised that it needed to be 'the curtains'. I wrestled with my conscience for a bit. (I don't like waste or spending money unnecessarily.) In the end, I bought more of the fabric and had curtains made and I'm so much better pleased with them. They have a much more 'mid-century' vibe and look much cleaner and more punchy. 

I still have one or two things to finish. I have a scrap of the curtain fabric left and will make a cushion cover or two. I also want somehow to disguise the rather ugly radiator - but it isn't a standard size for a ready-made cover or shelf, so I will have to be more inventive. 

These, below, are the 'before' pictures, taken when I first viewed the apartment. The previous owner's leather suite was very comfortable but rather too large and heavy for the room, in my view. I just had to remove that fireplace too! It was only an electric fire and I would never have used it. I didn't like the dominant, mock-Louis/Versailles feature in a modern room.