The Decomposition of Our Living Room.

Believe it or not, there was a time when we were actually content with the way our living room was looking.  That time was last year when it looked like this:

Since then, pillows have scattered themselves to other areas of the house, the ottomans got stained and buttons were ripped off, the couch cover got stained and has holes in it (!?), and the lamps we moved to the family room.  So, lately our living room looked closer to this:

Which feels very, "Eh" to us--and if you saw it in person, especially our naked couch and those ottomans, you would feel the same, I'm sure.  And as much as we both love our new arc floor lamp, it kind of makes things feel...empty without side tables.  And since we're already picking apart the room, we need a much larger area rug for this space so it can actually tuck under some furniture and not just float in the middle of the room. The whole room needed refreshed, even the purple wall that we painted very first when we moved into the house last year.  We love the drama of the purple, but purple isn't found anywhere else in our home--it was time for a change.

Earlier this week, we ordered a larger area rug for the space (we'll share those details when it arrives), and last night we decided to start on revamping that purple wall.  The plan is to add floor to ceiling paneling to that feature wall like this inspiration photo, found here:

Or one of our favorite eye-candy inspirations photos, found here:

After discussing what color we wanted the wall/paneling to be (do we want it to be white? the same color as our other walls? or something different?), we decided that since we had a lot of the same light greige that we have used on the other walls, we would use it--hoping the paneling would add enough oomph itself.  So, we broke out the paint we had on hand and got to work.  If you follow us on Facebook, we posted this teaser picture last night showing there was definitely something in the works.

The purple covered surprisingly easy and the whole task only took about 45 minutes and 2 coats, but it was about this point, when I realized, "I think we made a mistake."

And when the wall was all painted, I knew the box of greige was not for us. The room felt significantly smaller (weird) and tres boring.  

I tried to imagine this wall paneled, and maybe it wouldn't be so boring then--but it would, for us anyway.  We like a little bit of spunk in our decor and this wasn't giving it to us.

I will say, it looked better put together--better than the above pile of furniture, that is.  But we have officially crossed "greige paneled wall" off the options list. And we crossed "white" off, too.  We want something bold and dramatic that will still fit into the rest of our house's decor (which is why purple didn't really work anymore).

Then, I started finding more and more photos of really dark paneled walls that we both really loved (found here and here).

The wall and room can easily work with a black or almost black (like Benjamin Moore's Hale Navy pictured below...those rugs, I die) because of all the natural light it gets and it is still neutral enough to add other colorful accents in throws, area rugs and pillows.

I think we're sold--but are you?  We asked on our Facebook page in early May (we must have had this idea in our subconscious) how you felt about black accent walls and the reviews were mixed.  Weigh in!  We're off to pick up some swatches.