My Ideal Living Room

I’m back again! I’ve been continuing the flat hunt and am getting more and more picky as time goes on and I hate myself for it. So I thought, why not get it written down what my dream living room would be in this Ideal Student House I keep thinking about.

The last one I wrote up was My Dream Kitchen and I was having so much fun with it that I decided to move on into the next room in the house. Now, ideally, I would have a 2 bedroom flat with a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room, but I know this is extremely unrealistic unless I was to get a 3 bed place. Which is not going to fit within the ideal rent range! So for the purpose of this post, I’m going to combine my dining room with my living room.

Now before I get too far into looking at furniture for the room, I should really set out my rough colour scheme – then I can look at all the awesome cutesy furniture and rugs etc! So basically, I want carpet. I miss carpet. I need to be able to walk into my living room in my bare feet and feel the soft squishy carpet between my toes! Now, since it would be a student flat and I plan on having people round for group meals etc, it would need to be a heavy duty carpet, and one that isn’t going to show all the dirt of the day, or the spilt drinks that would inevitably happen. While my head is saying browns and beiges, my heart is leaning towards a cream or ivory carpet, and I’d just ban shoes in the room I think. So, having decided on this, I headed over to Carpet Right and chose their Hever Castle Saxony Carpet in Ivory as seen below.

As for the walls, I need something bright and fun. Too long have I put up with the dull off-white patchy walls of student halls and the student flat. I know they’re great for matching your own belongings to but if I were to have my own flat that I could decorate myself, the walls in my living room slash dining area would have to be the wallpaper, shown below, from B&Q but (and hear me out because I know this isn’t ‘normal’) but I think I would paint the skirting boards and windowsill this gold effect metallic emulsion paint from B&Q’s colours feature wall range. and I would probably have just white doors and door frames. Or the off-white thing that my dad always insists on buying every time we tell him to repaint their walls. So yeah, the colours below are the ones I think I would pick. But I think (and you can tell me when you see them below) the gold paint would go well with the wallpaper, what do you think?

Now that that’s sorted, I can have a bit of fun furnishing the place! I lot of the stuff I have at the minute is red and I actually quite like some of it, so to be honest I’d keep a lot of it.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, let’s look at the dining room part of the room. I tried looking at all those fancy sets that you see in the high end catalogues – those just weren’t right. And then I thought ‘hey, you could get a glass table!’ but that was a no too – think of the finger marks and rings from glasses set down without a coaster! No thanks. So in the end I found this and thought what’s wrong with the standard pine extendable dining table? I went hunting online and discovered the Debenhams Pine ‘Whistler’ extending dining table and 6 chairs and thought it would look great in my dream home! I can already picture it covered with my Christmas tablecloth… but that’s me just getting ahead of myself.

Of course, a dining set like this deserves some gorgeous crockery and something even more gorgeous to store it in! I have always had a thing for dresser units or sideboards for displaying nice crockery and ornaments, so when I saw this 3 door glass display unit from Home Essentials I just fell in love. This is something I would need in my ideal flat. The best part? I could store my books and DVDs on the shelves, and the crockery in the cupboards with all the placemats etc.

So accessories for the dining section would include the odds and ends down below. I know these aren’t the most interesting, or living room based, but I got started on the hunt of dining room things and got carried away.

I was going to include my wine glasses and the likes, but I figured we should move on with the actual living room stuff! So moving on and keeping within the theme, I think I would like 2 really comfy sofas (a corner sofa and a 2 seater) and I’m going to cover them in cushions and a warm throw to make them as cosy as possible. I’d also love to put an armchair in there too! I’ve put them all down below for your opinions. The three are all from Debenhams and details are below the photo!

Haha I don’t even want to know how much this dream flat is costing me so far, but I’m not done yet! I would need little end tables to put lamps on and the landline phone. I actually discovered that Debenhams have the same style for end tables, coffee table and a tv unit!

Now, I have just 2 more items of furniture I would keep in this room. The first would be a narrow bookcase from Ikea that I would put under the window and cover with cushions and blankets and soft toys so that it looks all cosy like a mini reading corner. I would probably also put in a few bean bags for when I have more people around, just so there are plenty of seats, plus who doesn’t love sitting in a bean bag, covered in a blanket, and reading when the rain is pouring down outside.

I’d also probably put photos and other odds and ends in there too, not just books. But it’s always just been one of those things I’ve wanted. The second piece of furniture I would love to have in my dream living room if money were no object, is an upright piano. I miss playing piano so much, just the feel of sitting down and pouring your heart and soul into the music. So while I would love to someday have a grand piano displayed in front of a floor to ceiling window, in my dream student living room I would settle for just an upright piano like the one below from McLaren’s Pianos.

So now that I’ve had a look at all my furniture, I should probably sign off and let you all get on with your lives! So just to finish, in order to preserve the carpet, I would probably have a shoe rack just inside the room and a range of different slippers and socks in the different compartments – think of something similar to a bowling alley where you check your shoes in and collect them on the way out!

So if you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts! I know I’ve written a lot and it can be hard to visualise so I drew a to-scale plan of the room just to see it all in place. Would you swap anything around?

Related: Are you looking to redecorate and change your skirting boards? Why not check out this Traditional Torus Design from Skirting World?