Hello again! It’s time for the second installment of the TV Room Make-Over. In this post I’ll tell you about what we did next in the planning of the TV Room. I have started to notice now as my renovation evolves, that the rooms I’ve spent more time on planning, do in fact look much better than those where I just winged it! As I progress through the renovation and my diploma, I’m learning what works and what helps take a pretty good design to much better.

In the TV Room make-over I did spend quite a lot of time up front on the planning before ever lifting a paint brush. I found that the 3D and 2D plans worked well for spatial planning, but it was still hard to understand exactly how the furniture and accessories would work together in the room in terms of colors and textures. I’m pretty good at visualizing things in my head, but seeing it all on a piece of paper before purchasing any of it can really help to hone in on the right items and make it easier to get a cohesive scheme.

I used PowerPoint to make my mood boards. Nothing fancy, but it works. There are design tools out there that you can buy especially for this, but they do a similar job to PowerPoint in that they remove the background from an object and you can layer it on the canvas. The background removal tool in PowerPoint is pretty rough n ready, but it’s very fast compared to manually removing the background in Photoshop. Which is perfect for playing around with different schemes until you find the perfect one.

I started off by designing a classic rustic farmhouse theme: loose cover linen sofa, lots of rustic wood and painted white furniture.

I loved this look, but I wanted to push the design to a more modern feel and try something a little different to the rest of the house. I loved how the bathroom turned out, and I wanted to keep with the same theme: rustic modern.

So with this second mood board I tried mixing modern white gloss furniture with some more rustic pieces to contrast the two styles, like I did in the bathroom. I loved this combination of rustic and modern. I chose the sofa in blue to make the design pop a little more. However, my tough client – aka my husband – wasn’t a huge fan of it, so we went for the beige instead.

The other thing I changed was the TV cabinet. To maximize the space in the room and to hide the wires, I chose this wall-mounted TV unit in white gloss. I decided to use the same paint color as the bathroom walls, because I loved it so much. I did try out other colors that were close, but Tinsmith by Behr won again!

The floor we chose was a French Oak engineered hard wood by Lumber Liquidators. It was very reasonably priced at just $3.05 per square foot. The color of the wood was quite cool in tone, meaning the warm reddish colored oak of our normal base boards just didn’t go. So we decided to use a white MDF base board, like we did in the bathroom to keep it fresh and modern.

I wanted to do something a little different in this room, and push my design skills a little further. So instead of just putting up shiplap or painting the wall, I decided to go for a custom vinyl wallpaper in a winter woodland theme. I’d seen this photo on Facebook by a friend of ours – Tammy Brice at Tammy Brice Creative, and asked her if I could purchase it for the feature wall. This is what set the theme for the whole room. (You can read about how to create a custom feature wall in the next blog.)

So I set about ordering all the items, most it from Joss & Main. And as usual, nothing ever goes smoothly…

The wall-mounted TV unit we ordered from Bed Bath & Beyond wasn’t in stock. And after searching every stockist and contacting the manufacturer, I was told they were out of stock everywhere. When the sofa arrived, we found that it wasn’t a reversible design as it had shown on the website, and instead was only right-handed and we needed left, so that had to go back. So the mood board had to undergo a further revision…

I ordered the Bickel Sectional sofa also from Joss & Main. I still prefer the look of the Jamarcus Sectional as it’s a little more minimalist, and I loved the inside-out rough-edge hem which is pretty unusual. Both sofas are a beige linen so both work in the design in that respect. The Bickel Sectional doesn’t come with a matching ottoman, so I had to chose another one. I chose the Mattingly Storage Ottoman by Wayfair in a blue linen. I knew I wouldn’t be able to match the beige of the sofa, so chose to contrast it instead.

All the scatter cushions are from Joss & Main (are you sensing a theme here!?). The basket is from Target. And the blue chunky knit throw is also from Joss & Main. I bought the ceramic vases from Magnolia Market, and a similar wooden tray to the one in the picture from Home Goods.

I chose another wall-mounted TV unit by Joss & Main in gloss white and rustic wood. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this one will arrive, as it currently says ‘on hold’ and is 2 days overdue its delivery date. I feel I may be onto option 3 very soon…

Stay tuned for the next update, which will talk about the feature wall.

Thanks, and until next time.

Jo