It’s no secret: I’m on a mission to brighten several rooms in our house from the darker and mid-darker grey pallet we currently have. I’ve talked about some of my favorite whites here. We’re in the process of lightening up our formal living space and upstairs stairway and hallway. The upstairs space has no natural light, and the key to brightening this space up will be light paint.
Our formal living room is only occasionally a place we chill in and most often is a transitory space from the front door, to the dining room/kids school room and upstairs. If I could start over with a layout blueprint for this house, I would do things very differently and change the position of this room. But we work with what we’ve got! Painting and rugging this space in light hues will go a long way to brighten the room.
When we moved in, the formal living area had original builder carpet, peach ceramic tile at the entry and in the fireplace surround and beige walls. Here is the “before”:
Here’s a glimpse of the “after” (which is about to change a ton too!):
One of the first things we did was to remove the carpet. When we signed the contract to buy this house, I did not know I was pregnant. I found out the next day, when we knew we would be moving. My pregnancy nose was on high alert when we moved in, and all kinds of scents were making me nauseas. So we did things a little backwards and replaced the carpet and began to prep for immediate wood floors. When we were planning the flooring for this space, we had to make a decision – either keep the red oak wood in the kitchen area and stain it to blend with new red oak floors elsewhere, or spend more to lay new flooring throughout the downstairs area. We decided to save money and lace in new wood floors. Doing this meant that I wanted to stain the floors a more consistent brown shade to eliminate some of the red wood, and that’s what we did. We picked a custom stain color that blended a darker brown with grey.
The dark floors are really nice but don’t do much for my mission to update and brighten the room. In addition to painting this, a quick and simple way to brighten is throw adding new rungs. I’ll post an update of the final and current “after” when we have our walls painted and the new rug down.
Here are some of my favorite light neutral 8×10 rugs from a budget saving $150 to under $700.
This West Elm rug is a neutral natural beauty. This is my third West Elm Jute rug I’ve owned. The first was a greyish green that my puppy spilled white paint all over. You can see a peekaboo view of it in my after image above. The replacement was great for about 8 years until the sun in the current spot began to fade it. This neutral natural lighter rug is the same as the other West Elm rug’s I’ve had, and I scored it on sale for under $500. Here’s a link to more West Elm: here.
I love the plaid of this McGee and Co. rug. At around $700 for an 8×10 version, this indoor/outdoor rug would look great in a light living room. For a mom who has a very lived in home, I tend to select indoor/outdoor runner rugs for my kitchen to withstand the food and messes that are inevitable.
I recently purchased this McGee and Co. Target jute rug to try in my dining area. It had relatively good reviews, and at under $200 for a 7×10 size, would be something I could live with if the kids spilled food all over. It’s been on and off sale over the past few weeks, but I set up an alert and was able to snag one before it went out of stock again. We’ll see if it lives up to the reviews. Here’s a similar option since this one keeps going out of stock: here.
Wayfair and Amazon are both great places for affordable rugs. I recently purchased this for my front entry, but ultimately decided to return it for a more natural fiber blend rug. This rug is a very popular rug for larger areas, and
This is another that is a great light color rug. If I don’t love the Target McGee jute rug for my dining space, I am probably going to get this one. This cotton option would be a lightweight, easy to clean option in a family room or dining area (with a spray of Scotch Guard just for extra measure).
If you are looking for something that looks like Studio McGee but is at a lower cost, the Loloi Rugs are a very close match. Here is a neutral rug for under $100 that looks like an $800 rug:
I’ll post the outcome of our dining room and living room refresh, and which rug we ended up loving. What great values have you found for lightweight, livable light colored living rooms?
