This Living Room Got a Bright Makeover with the Coolest Custom Furniture
Living rooms are often hubs of the home for everyone. They’re the perfect spot to unwind after a long day of work or school or errands or play (or another storied, event-filled day as a household pet).
“We have always spent the most amount of time on the couch in our living room,” homeowner Miranda Caldwell of Heck Yeah Home says of her family and home. “For a long time, the living room was just white walls with this comfy but dark gray sofa, with a variety of mismatched pillows and accessories. We mostly chose comfort over anything, so for example, we often ended up with a Christmas blanket still on the sofa in the summer.
Miranda says the design felt like an afterthought, and she and her husband, Jeff, tried a lot of different options and furniture in the living room. “Nothing felt quite right,” she says. That is, until Jeff (a skilled carpenter and woodworker, the second half of Heck Yeah Home) made a few game-changing pieces for the room.
White walls add brightness.
Miranda liked that the living room got great natural light from the west-facing window. In the before photos, as you can see, there’s a green accent wall, but Miranda and Jeff ultimately decided to go with light off-white paints to maintain the brightness and airiness, and they let the furniture and decor do the talking.
The wood furniture is one-of-a-kind.
Jeff made the blue (Benjamin Moore’s Franklin Lakes) storage cabinet, the TV console, and the wavy coffee table in the living room, and that’s when the design really started coming together, Miranda says. Because they have a narrow living room (and a little one), Miranda and Jeff wanted a coffee table with no sharp corners.
“Then the conversation turned into: ‘How can we take that ‘no sharp corners’ rule and make it a little more fun?’” she recalls. “So the blob-shaped coffee table was born. It took a while to get the puddle-blob shape feeling right, but we adore the table now.”
The transformation cost about $5,000.
A sofa slipcover and a new rug add some new texture to the room. “When our son was born, I realized that the gray sofa I so dreaded before was actually really comfy, and it could really just be slipcovered, making it washable and more appealing to my eye at the same time,” Miranda says. “That was a bit of an ‘aha’ moment.” (Miranda and Jeff’s slip cover is custom from Old Oakville Slipcover Company, but you can find a similar one from The Home Depot.)
That and the green rug from Rugs USA — inspired by a rug in Miranda’s grandmother’s house — add some coziness. “I’m the new biggest fan of green rugs, but this very specific tone of green that’s almost reminiscent of the ‘70s,” Miranda says. “This specific green tone kind of mimics grass, so I feel like the green rug in our space helps extend the feel of the room into the backyard and vice versa, which ultimately makes the living area feel larger and more inviting, especially in the summer.”
Miranda says the biggest lesson of the living room transformation was “how simple it really was to change the atmosphere of the room with a few intentional furniture swaps,” and she estimates it would cost someone about $5,000 to make a similar change. The Caldwells’ transformation cost $2,500 for the sofa and custom slipcover, $1000 for the rug, and about $1000 for the DIY console and the coffee table.
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