Your new house sounds beautiful!

For me, the most difficult room as been my office/study. I think this is because it is just a plain square room, with no architectural detail at all to work with. It also gets very little natural light and is small. Blech.

There's always one in every house, isn't there? For us it's been the living room. It's a wide rectangular shape, with only one free wall (the other two walls have floor to ceiling windows, and a huge fireplace). I've had the darndest time being able to take advantage of the fp while at the same time not blocking the windows and allowing for tv viewing. It's too narrow for two furniture arrangements, too wide for just one :)

Ours is our keeping room.

It is between the kitchen and dining room -- so a pass through room.

It has 5 doorway openings and 2 windows.
It has a huge cooking fireplace and corner built ins.

As someone put up this random molding outlining every feature -- I think they put canvas up to cover bad plaster and then had to put the molding up to cover where it met all the hand hewn beams.

Anyway --- it's empty and I'm stumped and someday I need to make it into our family room.

My living room. We have one living area and I want it
to look nice but not picture perfect.

We eat in this room most nights in the winter.
We have animals (2 cats 1 dog), 2yr old GD .

I had always had a formal LR because I had a great room.
Now that I look back, what a waste of space!
"Living room" is suppose to be just that "a live in room"

This room has been such a challenge I seem to be taking baby steps.
I want pretty but animal proof, comfy but
pretty, expensive looking but not expensive.

Now what was the question?????????

Zeebee, Might the original 9 ft dining room ceiling be above the 8 ft ceiling that you have now? If I was in your home, I'd be thinking of a way to investigate that one because if you can get the ceiling up, I think your decorating options will increase.

Our bungalow's bathroom is going to be the nightmare - it's 5 ft x 6 ft. It's #2 on the major project list for us and it'll take some funds to get it restored.

My MBR - I have changed bedspreads 3 times and I am still not happy. I am tired of just blinds - no drapes - and white walls. It is too big that it is a waste of space. There are also 3 sections to the room - a sitting area separated by pillars but not enough to really separate the area, the sleeping area and a dressing area that leads to the bathroom. Just too much to decorate and they each have their own "issues". I really miss my old house's MBR that was warm and cozy and not cavernous.

There's my rant!

Would have to be my living room/music room. It is a former garage and is large and square. I think square rooms are tough because there is no natural way to group furniture without leaving empty places. Rectangular rooms are far easier for me to think about.

Add to that a wall of sliders (former garage door) and a large opening into the foyer, leaving only two usable long walls. Oh, and the gargantuan speakers that have to be positioned in an equilateral triangle with DH's recliner! Yes, and my grandmother's 92" sofa. Uh, and the huge set of bookshelves DH has refused to give up for two years since their post-renovation move them into that room. (Corner units have been "staged" into the garage as we prepare to sell...I think DH finally sees what a ball and chain those damn bookcases are!) And, did I mention the grand piano?

Took me five years, but I finally figured that room out. And now we're moving. Deliver me...

My living room. It has the most hideous ugly focal point. Someone put this horrible 50's tile in aqua tan and cobolt blue, little tiny tiles in an arbitrary pattern.. very busy around the fire place. It just screams "i dont belong here" and it is beyond eye catching. I could not put a pretty patterned rug down because it was too much pattern for such a small space and if you dont work with the colors in there it gets really bad.

I decorated the house around it using silver sage and latte paint so at least we have no clash but everyone who comes in says .. cute little cottage.. who put that tile up? Bleck!

My living room -- no wall space to speak of, and the room is too small to float the furniture in the middle. Thanks to folks here, I managed to find something that works, but it was not easy.

I think kec01 might be right about your dining room ceiling height. I've never seen a house of that era with different height ceilings on the same floor. And no matter what anyone tells you here, don't paint that woodwork! ;)

Our living room. It is so big and also long. the fireplace is in the middle and not quite big enough (for the non-designer) to make two seperate areas out of it. We have done the best we can I think!

For me it has been our bedroom. We just finished painting it last week, it's a very nice shade of green, we wanted something calming. We also got a new mattress/box for one of two antique beds I inherited. I have a dresser that I need to clean up a bit, that will go nicely with it.
I haven't been able to find any bedding that isn't cheaply made, so I have resorted to the fact that I'll probably end up making this myself, which is alright.
I want this to be a great place for us, so I'm not rushing into it. When it comes to other areas, I always know what to do, but this is a challenge.
My style of decor is primitive,folk art, with my downstairs being more cottage, but I have managed to blend these styles together.
I'm just commenting, not really looking for suggestions, I'll know when it hits me.

Zeebee, Might the original 9 ft dining room ceiling be above the 8 ft ceiling that you have now? If I was in your home, I'd be thinking of a way to investigate that one because if you can get the ceiling up, I think your decorating options will increase.

Oh, I wish. The house is a typical Brooklyn rowhouse for its era (built 1890), with the entire garden/ground floor built with the lowest ceilings because that was where the kitchen was and no one spent money making the "servants' floor" anything more than functional. We are keeping the traditional layout with the dining room in front and the kitchen in the rear on that floor, with a modified butler's pantry in between. Somehow the low ceiling doesn't bother me in the kitchen, but in the dining room, with the wood enclosing the space, it feels cave-like.

And no matter what anyone tells you here, don't paint that woodwork! ;)

Don't worry! DH and I thought about it for two seconds - in our old place we painted the dining room wainscotting white with a beautiful gold above the chair rail and it was stunning - but we ain't touching that wood in this place.

For me it was our family room; because the seating that was logical for the space didn't work for TV watching. We kept working at it and found something that works, and now we love it. Sometimes you just have to go against conventional wisdom if it works for you, and determine what the actual purpose of the room is. I'm learning to really pay attention to the latter, and use it as the tie-breaker in tough decisions. The result is usually a space that is peaceful, where the people are happy, which spells success.

For me, it has to be the family room. It was preserved from the 60's..little or no natural light, a brick fireplace wall with ugly black mortar joints, dark dark faux wood paneling and to top it all, a interior chimney chopping up the room. and oh, I forgot, the popcorn ceiling that is so rough you can scratch yourself on it. So far, we have painted the paneling. I am looking at options to color the mortar in between the bricks but looks like its going to be a tough project. With a curious active 1 1/2yr old running around progress has been reallly slow. But i hope to get there someday..meanwhile, I drool over all the lovely rooms on this forum and imagine myself in such a room..:-)

It's the half bath for me! It's a SMALL room 3X5 and the wall kind of slants on the one side. It's set up so that the toilet sits in front of the sink with just enough room so that you can walk through the bathroom (Jack and Jill style). It's small so you feel you can't put much in there, however, I'm the type that doesn't like too much blank space so it's hard to find the right amount! That little room has been painted 4 times now and has had several differet color schemes. I think I finally got it right, though...I went neutral with my Prim style that I like.

I would love that "Extreme Victorian" - Victoriana's really grown on me over the last several years so that now I get all shivery over the over-the-top lighting fixtures and crazy wallpaper. And wainscoting like that, be still my beating heart! ;-) We have a little "Victorian Lite" house circa 1900, layout/architecture is totally late Victorian vernacular and stuff like the millwork, porch design, etc. is leaning very much into Arts & Crafts territory. That crossover point is what it wants decor-wise, too, it started telling me that even before we moved in!

I think the toughie for me is going to be the kitchen and its sitting area. PO tore out the wall between the kitchen and dining room so he could push the kitchen section out by 2 feet, but it makes for a slightly awkward space that doesn't really "go" with the rest of the architecture. I do thank all gods that he didn't rip the wall between the DR and LR down to make a "great room", UGH! Since we would very rarely use a formal dining area and wasting 160sf of a I'm actually looking forward to the half bath, which is the same size as Sweets' - one thing I love about those tiny rooms is that you really can go completely over the top with things that would be just like a sledgehammer upside the head if you had them in a larger room, like strongly-colored wallpaper or a so-gaudy-it's-fantastic miniature chandelier. It's in a very-obvious later addition to the house and I'm considering going all-out Deco to satisfy DH's leanings toward the contemporary without creating too much cognitive dissonance. (He's such a doll to put up so cheerfully with my antiques et cetera.)

Ours is definitely going to be the kitchen in our 1891 Victorian house. Starting at the top: the original ceiling is covered over in utilitarian plywood panels with narrow battens over the seams. We don't know what's under there; maybe badly damaged plaster, maybe pine T & G? Who knows. There is more recent linoleum or vinyl as backsplashes that will have to come off and be replaced with some pretty tiles we found, and the counters will have to be redone. But the biggest problem by far is the floor. It is covered with the most hideous glued-down-tight vinyl that may be hazardous to remove. These people were really into glue at this house. I guess they thought everything would get up and run away if they didn't use industrial strength adhesives in industrial quantities. There is old pine T & G under it, but I don't know at this point if it's worth it to try and uncover it. We may have to put some kind of new flooring over it, which would raise the floor a little and then what to do with the thresholds? They'll be higher on the kitchen side than the rooms on the other side of the doors/thresholds, and the new higher floor will also make the old, deep baseboards look shorter. The cabinets will need to be either stripped of the old paint or prepped really well for new paint.

Mine is the awkward rectangular FR. The entire fireplace wall is brick from floor to ceiling and from end to end. Everything I put on the mantle looks dwarfed. Our tv doesnt fit right in the room (we really need a smaller tv-plasma or LCD...sigh) There is a half wall between the kitchen and the FR and the other wall is glass panels and French door. Oh yeah, forgot to mention our enormous dog crate for our 90 lb Weimaraner doesnt exactly "go" with our non-decor either. Just a tough room for someone with my limited vision and budget to cope with.

Can I say all? before we moved into this house I liked country and victorian decor. Well this house is all 1950s! So im having to change up my way of thinking.