Living room face-lift

We live in an older home and we also rent so it's difficult sometimes to make it reflect our style instead of my grandparent's. Being a young married couple, we have our fair share of hand-me-down furniture, which is appreciated but can also make it hard to showcase one particular style. So, after some thought, Jason and I tackled some of the issues. This past summer, Jason painted the back room and made it into a home office to reflect his musical side, and painted the middle room for me to have as an artsy, crafty, reading room. Now, we set our eyes on the living room, which is a challenge: it's very dark as only one wall is painted white and the other three are dark gray. We plan on painting it all one color in the spring but for now, the paint will have to stay as is. It has a huge front window but we live on a very busy street so any fabric window treatments have to be thick enough to allow us privacy, while at the same time not making it feel like a cave. We can't change the carpet since we don't own the home (nor could we afford to) so it also has to stay and it is a shade of light blue. Our color scheme up until today has been yellow, green, brown and red, and it is now chocolate brown, blue, black and oatmeal. Here's what we accomplished today:

- a local store was having a closeout sale so we bought a new loveseat! It is chocolate brown which is optimal for us since we have a dog and cat and we have always had lighter couches that we've had to put covers on, and we HATE the covers because they bunch and look lousy after you sit on them for any length of time. The couch is due in to the store this coming Thursday.

- Jason has a coffee table from college that he purchased with his roommate and it's been living in our garage because up until we got rid of a chair, it hasn't fit into the room without being too crowded. Jason lugged it in and the old one out. It's a lovely, modern dark wood table.
- We bought new lampshades that are an oatmeal color which really brighten up the room.
- We bought two long window panels in oatmeal (to replace the sage ones) with a subtle stitched pattern, which both lighten up the room and keep passerby eye's out.
- New rug with a retro block pattern with all of the new colors in it.
- two new throw pillows (which you can't see in the picture) for our new couch. They are blue with a fleur de lise esque design in chocolate brown.
- table top wrought iron candle centerpiece for the coffee table

We want to get some new artwork for the walls that reflect our new color scheme since the current artwork is two framed pieces with red poppies (my favorite!) as the focal point. But even just those few touches have really changed the appearance of the room, making it much more reflective of our age and much more us! It's exciting and hopefully you'll like what we did! Wish I had a before and after shot but many of you have been in our living room and will remember what it looked like prior to today. Ignore the red throw and red striped pillow in the background, they are both going away! Stay tuned for a picture of the wall you can't see in the picture when the new sofa comes in and we get some new artwork up!