This newsletter, much like the family room, is going to take quite a journey. Grab your favorite warm drink and settle in. I am excited to share how the biggest room in our house went from point A to point B with some intense detours to point Z and point 14 in between.

The fireplace room is the most “open” room in our house. It’s right off the front door and the kitchen. It’s also visible from almost everywhere you stand on the first floor. It is set three steps down from the main level and has railing that separates it from the rest of the space.

The fireplace surround is made with reclaimed brick and when we bought the house it had an electric iron fireplace box. The room was painted a beige (the whole house was painted a beige) and the previous owners had their TV hung on the wall to the left of the fireplace.

I loved the room. It was big with great light and it felt nice from the start. It also felt like a layout challenge but I figured I would stick to the previous owners’ plan and put our TV on the same wall. The other half of the room would be a sitting area.

Before we moved in, in July 2022, we had the flooring stained a darker color, my dad painted the walls white (Clare Paint Whipped) and we replaced the ceiling fans with black chandeliers. After moving in, I quickly added white shades to the light bulbs.

Above are a few photos from around move in time that make me feel…stressed. I shifted furniture around often as I tried to make sense of the space. We got the TV hung. I found a giant antique rug that filled the whole room. We tried our big sectional in a few spots. (As you can see, those first few months, our green marble kitchen table was still a coffee table.)

In the fall of 2022, I sold our big tan leather sectional on Facebook Marketplace and ordered a green couch and white swivel chairs to put in the same space. This photo above was a rare moment of peace in the chaos. It looks like a room! But unfortunately, to the left of the image is just a TV hanging in front of an area without furniture. We were not quite there yet.