I hate my living room

Well I do! I've lived with the previous owners' crap decorating for about 7 years now and I've so had it. Not that I can do anything about it, but the hatred is building and is doing my head in. Same with the kitchen but that's even less likely to get fixed anytime soon so I'm trying to live with it. If I'd been organised here I'd have a photo of the living room for you to sympathise with me over, but this is spur-of-the-moment because I came across the old magazine page that has my dream living room on it and I thought I'd share. What do I hate about the current living room? The wallpaper is, well, wallpaper, which I despise. Worse, it's this sort of grey-ish off-white that makes everything look dingy, which doesn't help in an already dark room. And it's starting to peel in places. Our couches are too big for the space, and dark grey. Our art is too bitsy for the walls, the shelves with the tv/stereo/DVDs are a mish-mash and make it look like a student flat. Winge winge moan moan.

So what do I dream of? I dream of something like this:

I can't even remember what magazine it was out of other than I bought it to take 'camping' with us when we were in Edmonton in the summer. It was a useless magazine but it did have this page. What do I like about it? Well it's full of light even though there's no direct sun (actually there is now that I look at it closely, darn!) - exactly what our living room could be like - it's south facing (equivalent to north-facing for you N. Americans), with a small window looking west. I like the way the colours all work together with a neutral base and pops of something brighter. It's a bit bland perhaps, but I'm not looking to copy slavishly. Our curtains and oriental rug in there are deep red, but the curtains do have a bit of pink so I think we could come up with something although not as girly! Redoing the big heavy curtains as blinds would really open things up I think. And there's integrated shelving which is exactly what we need. Short of winning the lottery we're not going to end up with new sofas, but I've made covers before so that's a good compromise.

I can do so much of this myself, but unfortunately the wallpaper needs to be stripped and the walls plastered before anything can be started and sigh, that's not in the budget at the moment! No doubt by the time we get to it I'll look at this picture and laugh because it looks so dated :)

ETA: I found an earlier post that has a bit of the despised living room. Did you know that "orange" natural polished floors are 'out' and darker or lighter stained floors are 'in'? Idiots - would these be the floors they raved about only a year or two ago? I love how the magazine this was in used the term orange in such a pejorative way. :))