When our house got featured on Design Mom, I was excited. It was before I had my own blog, so it was a chance to flex my new photography muscles, and get in some writing.

When I found out which photos she’d selected for the post, I discovered she’d chosen not to feature our living room. Besides the kitchen, the living room is the core of a home. We spend a lot of time in ours. We do most of our schoolwork there, and it’s where I typically hang out during quiet time. Not featuring it seemed like it was leaving out an essential part of our home.

But when I looked at the photos I’d submitted, I realized why she’d skipped it. It was the very first room I decorated in my first grown up home. My design choices were very reserved, in keeping with what I thought a house like ours should look like: there was a traditional rug, a huge, Craftsman-style coffee table, and a large painting of the Italian countryside on the mantle. There was a beige accent chair in the corner of the room that was impossibly uncomfortable.It didn’t reflect my personal style the way rooms I decorated later did. So little by little over the next few years, I started making changes to the living room in order to bring it up to speed with the rest of the house. Some of the changes had already taken place when I sent in my photos for the Design Mom post, but later changes to the room felt bigger, more daring, and purposeful.

I admit, after my living room’s “rejection,” my goal was to make it a room that Design Mom would have said yes to.  More than that, I wanted it to be a comfortable place that reflected my design aesthetic. It’s still a work in progress – I’ve never been one to stop aiming for perfection – but these days, the changes tend to feel more like tweaks than major projects.

One of the first things I did was to send the Italian countryside to live at the Chaplain’s office at the college where he worked, and it stayed there when he moved on to his next job.

The countryside was replaced by a wood shim sunburst mirror project I came across in This Old House. I made it for less than forty bucks. It is enormous, and heavy, but I love how it looks – including the wedge I accidentally glued together in the wrong pattern – it’s that little imperfection creeping in to remind me of my place. I replaced the traditional rug with a bright, graphic one with pink, purple, and typography on it. (That’s Baby Four laying on the rug below)I traded the brightly colored rug out with the more traditional one seasonally. Later, the bright rug moved permanently to the girls’ room. I thought I wanted another bright-colored, boldly designed rug for the space, and I found a beautiful one online with colors that faded into one another.

The wool rug I chose was a disappointment on arrival. On the website, it had looked vibrant, like a multi-hued rainbow. In person, it is neutral with a few pops of darker greens, greys, browns, and rusts. But as it turns out, that is perfect for not showing stains, and it has worn really well. It doesn’t detract from any other part of the room, but in its own way, it still has personality.My mother-in-law once made a passing comment on a visit to our house when Four was a baby. She mentioned the size of our coffee table. Wasn’t someone going to wack their melon on a corner of its massive expanse? I wanted to please her, and I already knew my coffee table was enormous. Her comment spelled its eventual dismissal. It was great for board games, but it really was huge and I was already out of love with it. The cherry finish called for neurotic use of coasters which my family wasn’t capable of, and the result was that the top of it was marked by rings of blistering finish, a veritable Mecca of Venn Diagrams.

I found another project in This Old House, this time, a recycled wood coffee table. In the magazine, an old cabinet door had been placed on fabulous steel legs. I ordered steel legs from Etsy, then started thinking about what I would use for the top. I didn’t have a cabinet door, and I didn’t know where I would get one. Craigslist didn’t turn up anything promising, certainly not the all-wood beauty that had been found for free and used in the magazine.

I ended up looking to the backyard and the basement, and cobbled together a selection of scrap wood in different colors. Once it was assembled, I used a wax finish as recommended in the directions. It has a much smaller footprint than our old coffee table, which went to a college student on Freecycle. The wax finish has done surprisingly well for all the times someone has forgotten to use a coaster (or covered it with crayon graffiti). And since it is scrap wood, I can easily replace the top if someday my family does something to it that I can’t live with.As an aside, when my mother-in-law visited again after I’d built the new coffee table, she said something about how small it was, and didn’t the kids bump into its jagged edge? She wasn’t trying to be critical; she was probably concerned about the safety of her grandkids. It DOES have that uneven edge facing out toward the room. Her comment reminded me of the dangerous territory we enter when we try to please others.

As for injuries caused by the old and new coffee tables, due to poor record keeping, I’m not sure how they compare. I do know the only serious injury was with our new coffee table’s steel leg, which is not sharp. I’m still not sure how Five sliced her ear on it when the kids were rough housing in the living room when she was about two. It split her ear grotesquely, and I put it back together again. She still has a scar.

Our kids adjust to the furniture we have in our house, and I’m quite sure even in a padded space, they would find a way to bounce off the ceiling and land on the floor to give themselves a head injury, so I try not to worry too much about it. After all, their mom is a nurse.

It’s not finished yet. Keep an eye out for Part II.