Adding The Finishing Touches To Our Living Room Makeover

So I think this is my first interiors post in about a year. When we first bought the house in February 2016, I had high hopes of sharing loads of home renovation content with you all. I put a couple of posts up and then, well, I stopped. The truth is, life (and wedding planning!) got in the way of redecorating, and I just didn't have anything that exciting to share with you all. But when I did my blog survey a couple of weeks ago (thank you to anyone who took the time to fill it in), interiors content was high on the list of stuff you wanted me to create, and it really gave me the motivation I needed to get back on the home decor bandwagon.

First on our to do list was finally getting our living room properly finished. Some of you may remember that we did the more labour intensive parts of redecorating this room about a year ago - we stripped the wallpaper, painted the room light grey and gave the ceiling a fresh lick of paint too. It looked loads better as a result but it was missing the finishing touches, and that's what we finally got round to doing this weekend.

There were no major jobs to do, but the details we've added have totally transformed the space. We put up some open shelves which has allowed us to display plants and pretty books. We took down the rank beige curtains that were here when we moved in and hung some gorgeous chevron ones. We finally put up a lampshade after spending months trying to find one we liked.

But the detail which has probably made the biggest difference is putting up some prints. We knew we wanted to add some wall art to this room as soon as we painted it - the ceilings are pretty high and with it being painted in such a light colour, we knew we'd need something to break the blocks of space up.

We only had a few criteria for prints - we needed a couple of big ones so they didn't look tiny on such tall walls, they needed to be something that we loved looking at as we spend so long in the living room and they had to be reasonably priced. While we love our little house right now, we probably won't live here forever, so investing a lot of money into something that was perfect for the space didn't seem like the right thing to do.

Enter Desenio! Not only do they have an insane number of prints to suit everybody's taste, they come in a whole range of sizes and they're super affordable too. Bingo. The only problem I had was settling on which prints to order for our living room - I loved so many of them and I kept changing my mind whenever I stumbled upon a new one.

I'm really happy with the ones we eventually ended up choosing. For above our fireplace, we opted for a map of New York and a beautiful print of some monstera leaves. The New York map was an obvious choice - anyone who knows us knows that it's our favourite place in the world and it's where we got engaged, so it's nice to have a little reminder of the city in our home. I felt like the monstera leaves provided a nice contrast to the monochrome map and added a lovely pop of colour to our living room too.

We also chose a smaller print to display on our new open shelves, a beautiful photo of sea foam. This one was Sam's choice and I really love it - the colours are gorgeous and as we got married by the sea, it's another print that reminds us of happy memories. We chose gold frames for them all as that is our accent colour for this room and I think they look way more expensive than they actually were.

With addition of a couple of plants, some candles and some fresh flowers on the fireplace, our living room makeover is finally complete. I'm so happy with how the room looks now - it couldn't be further away from the magnolia textured wallpaper hell we encountered when we collected our keys! I'm really glad that we managed to get it finished before winter too - I'm already planning plenty of cosy evenings snuggled up in here.

*This post was in collaboration with Desenio and they have very kindly given me a discount code to share with you all! The code “sophiecliff” will get you 25% off posters (excluding handpicked/collaboration posters and frames) between 10th - 12th October. Let me know if you buy anything!