Fun Monday-Favorite Room

Our lovely Fun Monday hostess this week is Jan, and she wants to see our favorite room in our house. Weeks ago I promised before and after pictures of the renovations to our new house, and I must confess that since then I've lacked the motivation to dig out all those photos and post them. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to it, but in the meantime, this post gives me the opportunity to show you at least one of the rooms.

While the kitchen is a close second because it's big and has lots of counter space and good glory in the mornin' a PANTRY, my favorite room is the living room. It is the center of our home and where we land when we're not bathing, eating or sleeping. When we realized a couple of years ago that we had outgrown our old house, we started making a list of things we wanted in a new house, and near the top of the list was space to entertain. We could entertain a large group of folks on the deck of the old house but had little room indoors. That limited our entertaining to months that are neither cold nor hot and humid. Basically, May, June, September and October. We certainly fixed that issue with the new home. We love the large living room.

We purposefully chose furniture that would maximize the seating capacity, like this table with pullout benches. How cool is that?

It was one of my favorite furniture purchases, and when we use those little benches and the ottoman, we can comfortably seat thirteen people in that room. If we drag in more chairs, we can hold more. I LOVE that.

That entertainment center was a splurge purchase for us. We scrimped in some other areas in order to buy that piece. Hubby and I fell in love with it when we saw it, and it hides the electronics so the room doesn't scream TV when you step inside. I hate it when the TV is the focal point of the room, and I didn't want the TV over the fireplace because it's uncomfortable to watch it that way even if it does look good in those pictures in House Beautiful. What I did put over the fireplace was a print that belonged to Sissy.

It was one of the few things we saved from her stuff. She bought it in St. Thomas on a vacation we took with her, and it gives her a presence in this house. It reminds me of the good times we had with her, and I love the colors in it. The vase on the left holds sand from a vacation in Destin, Florida (my, that caused a search of my bag in the airport) and shells from various trips we've taken to the Caribbean. We installed the fireplace as an alternate heat source during power outages. After last year's ice storm and eighteen day outage, we felt the need to better prepare ourselves for such things. We actually use the fireplace quite often and love it.

As you can tell, I still have a few empty shelves and corners to fill, but my interest in decorating went by the wayside after seventeen paint samples, four trips to the furniture store and and endless hours researching and shopping on the internet. I'll get around to filling those spots one of these days. In the meantime, we're just enjoying the space and feeling blessed that we have a house that truly fits our needs. Now, toddle on over to jan's and see what everyone else has to show us today.