Sometimes you need a little help

As I may have mentioned before, we moved into a new house a year ago. Over the past year, we’ve been settling and and figuring out exactly how we’re going to use the space. it’s been fun — but sometimes challenging — to figure out how to decorate our new space, which is twice the size of our old one. Our house has a lot of windows and tall ceilings and other architectural features. All great. But not things I’ve had to work with before in my decorating.

Some rooms, like our bedroom and sitting room, are pretty much done, but others are in varying stages of completion. Now, I’m a person whose house will never be truly “finished” because I like projects and changing things up too much. But there are definitely some rooms in our house that need more work and finishing than others.

Our formal living room is one such space. It’s a great room, open to the second story, with a wall of windows and French doors and open to the foyer, our bedroom and the kitchen/breakfast room area. For those reasons, it’s been something of a challenge for me to decorate. I’ve changed up the furniture placement several times, but I’ve never been completely satisfied. I feel like my normal-size accessories are dwarfed by the tall ceilings, and I’ve struggled with how to fill up the expansive two-story beige wall behind our diminutive sofa.

Painting and replacing the color-blocked sofa are not an option at this point. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the story of how that color-blocked sofa came to be; let’s just say it involves an expensive Amy Karyn linen fabric that I simply fell in love with and wasn’t willing to part with when the cushions got holes in them because expensive linen sofas do not mix with kids and pets but should instead be reserved for little-used rooms.

I decided to call in a pro, aka interior decorator Rene of the blog Cottage & Vine, to help me with furniture placement and finishing touches in that room.  I also wanted to bounce some other ideas off her relating to our guest bedroom, dining room and master bathroom, which is painted with the most horrendous mural. (We’re talking Grecian urns and flowers and just ugliness that really interrupts my serenity when I’m soaking in my bathtub!)

I found Rene through a Craigslist connection. Last summer, I bought an antique buffet off Craigslist from a local vintage dealer and proceeded to paint it for my entryway. I’ve been following that dealer on Facebook since then, and one day she mentioned she’d worked with a designer and linked to a post Rene wrote about a project she did in her home. That set me off exploring Rene’s site and her design projects. I really liked her sense of style and thought she’d be the perfect person to help me make some decorating decisions in my house.

On the day after  I returned from the Lucketts Spring Market, Rene came to visit and we spent the morning moving furniture around, coming up with a furniture arrangement that has been working for the space. A few days later, Rene sent me this mood board to help me finalize the artwork and accessories for the space. She also posted about some other ideas for my space on her blog, Cottage & Vine.

And I’ve done nothing with it in the two months since. But now, I’m ready to start incorporating some of Rene’s suggestion. But as luck would have it, I need help again, hers and yours.

The lamps Rene used in the mood board are no longer, available, but she suggested some similar ones ceramic gourd lamps from JCPenney.

I finally made it to the mall today, and found the lamps Rene recommended. But there was a problem. There were two sizes, and I wasn’t sure which Rene actually intended and which would look best in my space. So I bought them both (actually a set of both lamps.) And there’s a third choice I’m weighing, too. See, a few days ago, I found some pretty architectural-style lamps at Home Goods with a wooden base and a tailored linen shade. They reminded me of an earlier suggestion Rene had made for my space. So, I bought them, too.

Now I can’t decide which set of lamps looks best in my space.

The big gourds?

The small gourds?

The architectural lamps?

Please forgive the horrid quality of my photos below. I snapped them in the waning light with my cell phone in the 16 seconds before the pillows on the sofa got completely wrecked and the room was overrun with Skylanders. But you’ll get the gist.

Don’t forget that this space will eventually have an artwork arrangement over the sofa to draw your eyes upward. I’ll also have tables of equal height flanking the sofa, as you see in Rene’s plan. (I’m not using the pink desk that you see in her photos; I prefer it in a different spot in the room. But I am actively on the hunt for another Duncan Phyfe round table or another table of similar height to balance the right side of the sofa.

Enough yapping, which lamp is your favorite for my space:

The small ceramic gourd lamp (26 inches tall)

The large ceramic gourd lamp (36 inches tall)

The wooden architectural lamp (didn’t measure it, but it’s probably close to 26 inches tall, too).

I need your feedback, and I’m sending this to Rene, too.

My son likes the large ceramic gourd lamp because he says it gives the most light. 5-year-olds. I think I’m leaning a certain way, as well, but I won’t reveal that here so as not to bias the survey results. (And please forgive the Minnie Pearl tag and on the architectural lamp and the plastic on the shade on the large gourd lamp. I promise to remove those when I finally decide on THE lamps for the space.