House Tour: Living Room/Dining Room

Andrew and I definitely appreciate space, but in the search for our first home, location won. We closed on our 1,000 square-foot downtown condo in September and have been trying to maximize space ever since. We feel like we've made great progress in the six months we've owned our condo, but we have a long way to go. Note that the dining room table in the photos below has no chairs, for example.

I'm sharing the living room and dining room tour in one post, because they are basically in one room (along with the laundry room/pantry, but I will write about that later since I shoved all the clutter from the other spaces in there to take these pictures!) The kitchen is in this area too, but we're hopefully getting a new addition to our appliances this week, so if all goes as planned I'll be able to post about that room soon. (Andrew is already talking about taking doors of things and is measuring our doorway as I write, so this may not go as planned.)

Our tour begins at the front door, looking into the living room with the dining space in the background. (I took this photo standing on the stairs that are to the left of the front door when you walk in.)

Please excuse the mantel—I have a few vague ideas about what to do with it and I really dislike the random assortment of stuff that is up there right now. The fireplace is really deep and the television is mounted freakishly high (Andrew likes it that way?) so whatever I arrange up there is going to need to have some height. Right now, it kind of collects clutter. We have eventual plans to get pillows and turn the chest to the right of the fireplace into seating, but right now Ham likes to lay there so I put his dog bed on top of it. We also have big plans to get rid of that bright orange extension cord.

Our (tan-in-real-life) rug was $79 at Target. We'll be adding this chair (or one similar) to the empty nook on the left of the fireplace soon. 

Here's a before-and-after of the dining area, looking into it from the living room:

No chairs!

We also have plans to get bar stools for our counter (you can kind of see it to the left in the photo above) which means we literally have no dining seating right now. I'm looking for bar-height saddle stools in a dark espresso or chestnut, but the search is proving harder than we thought.

I'm pretty much obsessed with it our paint color, Behr Ultra Porpoise. It's a light gray with lavenderish undertones (but not girly, Andrew says) in bright natural light. At night, it darkens and is very calming. Behr Ultra goes on really smoothly, is easy to peel off of the floor if you drip on hardwood and comes off of skin easier than the Color Run color. (I'm serious - we can't say enough good things about Behr Ultra. And, I had to scrub for days to get that colored cornstarch off of me!)

If you can look past the beagle in the below photo, I think this picture best captures what the porpoise color looks like in natural sunlight:

So, that's the living room and dining room! I don't have photos before we painted the walls, but they were white and very, very dirty. We love the progress so far and try to do a little work on the house each weekend. Anyone out there have any mantel decorating ideas?