Couches couches everywhere

Changes have been afoot in the living room. As I mentioned, we wanted to get a sectional for the room — it’s something we’ve wanted for a long time, but it wouldn’t have worked in our apartment. Now we have the perfect layout, with two relatively long walls framing the central living space.

Last you saw the living room, it was looking like this:

Now it’s looking like this:

I have to apologize for the terrible photos of this room — it’s really hard to photograph. It has a lot of windows but they face north so they don’t get huge amounts of light all the time. Since it’s still pretty dark when I leave for work and when I come home from work, the time to take the best photos is on the weekend when I can take photos midday. But we were traveling this weekend, and I didn’t want to wait to share lest you wonder if we’re making any progress or just frittering our time away. In the future, though, I will work to get better photos of the living room….

In any case, we decided to go with the Karlstad sectional from IKEA — our dark gray couch is the exact same thing but in sofa form, and we’ve really liked it. Plus it’s relatively inexpensive for a large sectional, while still feeling and looking fairly nice.

We’d originally planned to buy one new and have it delivered, but then I saw one on craigslist that was only 2 months old for a few hundred dollars less so we scooped it up ($600 slightly used compared to $800 new plus $150 for shipping). We did have to rent a uhaul truck to get it (which cost $45), but we still came out ahead (and I like to buy used where possible for philosophical reasons). We brought it home Sunday evening, and left the pieces in the sun room:

It would have been great to set it up right away, but we still needed to do a few things. First, I wanted to paint the legs just like I did for our Karlstad couch. I detached them all and took them down to the basement for a few quick coats of spray paint in oil rubbed bronze. (And I did a little jig at having a basement to spray paint in rather than having to wait for good weather and daylight to do it in the backyard like in our apartment.)

I really feel like the darker legs make it feel so much less like a generic IKEA piece. The oil rubbed bronze looks like dark wood from afar, and is an easy alternative to sanding and staining.

The other thing we did was put on a new cover. We love the dark gray (called Sivic Gray) that the couch came with, which is the same cover we have on our sofa version, but we found that it gets scruffy looking fast because our cat sheds light-colored hair. The cover is very durable and the hair comes off very easily, but especially in the summer we had to clean it off basically every day. We thought a light fabric would be better, even though traditionally we assume light fabrics are more likely to show wear and tear. We picked up a new cover in Isunda Gray when we were at IKEA a few weeks ago in anticipation (we knew we’d be buying the couch a few weeks before we actually picked it up), and then swapped out the covers when we finally brought the couch home. It’s relatively easy to swap out the covers but still took awhile to do the body of the sectional and all the cushions.

We also had to change the orientation of the couch. It’s not totally symmetrical — one side is a little longer than the other, and you can switch which way it’s oriented. The craigslist sellers had the long edge on the right, but we needed it on the left to fit our living room layout. We had to take off the arm rests to swap the covers anyway, so the only additional thing to do was move two bolts (which was fairly obvious — we didn’t need directions or anything). Then we screwed the legs back on, and were good to go!

We also got a new coffee table while we were at IKEA so that we could move our old coffee table into the sun room. That’s also where we moved the couches that we previously had in our living room. We’re still working on the layout, though, so I won’t share photos yet. I know it seems like we buy a lot of IKEA stuff and I realize maybe we’re grown-up enough to graduate to something higher end, but frankly I really like some IKEA things and I think they look fine as long as they’re used in moderation (and sometimes customized a little). Some day down the road we may splurge more on furniture and there are some things worth investing more in, but we’re okay with a little IKEA in our home.

We still have a long way to go — getting art on the walls, side tables and lamps, curtains (I did order fabric), and figuring out what furniture we want in front of the picture windows. But we’re making steps in the right direction! Next time, I promise photos with much better light!