You know that space in your home that you spend so much time in, you almost become blind to what it looks like? It’s just a purely functional and necessary space. For us, that was our living room. Couch + TV… check and check. We’d get home at the end of the day, kick off our shoes and relax wherever there wasn’t laundry piling up or a dog claiming their territory for the night. We’d had intentions of updating the space for years, it was never a priority though. Both money and time wise. But, once we started renovating the front portion of our downstairs living area, it quickly created a harsh contrast between what we wanted and what we were just living in.

Maybe Alexa was listening (haha, i’m kidding) to us complain because around the same time we started tearing out floors to finally update the living room, Amazon Home asked if we were working on any room updates (yes, Yes, YES!). A better partner could not have come at a better time. We are already diehard Amazon fans. From groceries to photoshoot props, I’m on there several times a week.

I was curious in learning more about how I could redecorate a room with Amazon Home though. When you think of purchasing big furniture pieces for your home, it probably isn’t one of the first places you think to look… well, you should. So in this first post leading into the reveal of our room, I wanted to take you through the process of designing our room and executing it with the help of Amazon.

The before:

Our room was a dumping ground for laundry, old books, piles of blankets and pillows that didn’t “go” in any other room, magazines that hadn’t been touched in years, stereo equipment that hadn’t been used for longer than that, etc. You name it. I think the problem started around the large set of bookshelves. Anything would fit in there so we filled them up! I had a bad habit of taking laundry out of the dryer and piling it on a chaise, that almost no one sat on, which was another big problem. 5 loads later I didn’t have the energy to fold it. So we would basically dig through to find what we needed each day (yep, that’s embarrassing to admit). And our last big problem was the mess the dogs created. They ran around that room (and the furniture in it) like it was a playground made for them. This resulted in dirty, torn upholstery that I tried to fix with throw blankets. Thinking back, it was a disaster. I’m shocked my friends sat in there when they visited.

Our plan to fix it:

Throw everything away. Literally… we only saved one piece of furniture (the chaise no one sits on, ha!). That wasn’t our intention at first. We started by taking our furniture out to remove the floors and then it just felt so good to have the old pieces out, we decided to keep it that way. We cleaned out the bookcases and painted them white which was a HUGE difference. We kept only necessary electronics in there leaving the rest of the space for decor and books/mags we’re reading at the moment. I’m sure it will evolve to hold different things but for now we’re keeping it pretty minimal and functional (minimal for ME that is). Once we had this blank slate, I spent a few hours on Amazon searching for the big pieces I knew we would need to make our room functional again. For us, this was a couch, coffee table, and potentially accent chairs.

When searching for furniture, we decided to stick with leather (even though I pushed and begged for velvet or linen). It was just more practical with us having 3 dogs. They love jumping up there with us and we’re really bad at saying no. Instead of fighting them every night we decided to make a choice on something that would last much longer. As a compromise, I did a search for velvet chairs that would sit on the other side of the room. Besides the accent chairs, everything else in the room had to be pet friendly. In my searches, I made sure to look for things that were sturdy (in terms of construction), easy to clean, and made of durable materials.

I had a general idea of what I wanted things to look like, but there are SO many options on Amazon Home, it took some time to narrow them down. What I loved about shopping on here was the “discover your style” function (shown here). It is a visual way to shop that lets customers see more of the looks they like by simply clicking ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ for instant recommendations.. It was helpful in that I wasn’t seeing items that I would never consider.

Our inspiration:

I wanted to keep it pretty neutral with some green and touches of pink (shocker). Starting with a clean white room made that pretty simple. And finishing our concrete floors was definitely the right decision for this room and the look I was going for. I didn’t type in specific colors when I was searching for potential items. Rather I found shapes I liked and tried to find something similar that would go with our color palette. I mean, I was super open as everything we decided on was going to be a huge improvement. So going into this with an open mind as to how it would turn out made it really easy for me to find items that worked well together.

Progress:

Our progress at this point was having the entire room stripped to start from scratch. We didn’t want put a single piece of furniture in the room until it was all there. Usually this might be a problem if you were waiting on several different stores w/ different processing times. But since we were able to use Amazon Prime, everything arrived within a week (all with free shipping!) with the exception of the couch. It was the easiest redecorating project i’ve ever done!

We ended up going with the 3 items below as our main focus for the room. Everything else was going to be integrated in to compliment these colors and finishes. The Rivet Edgewest Modern Sectional, Rivet Frederick Mid-Century Modern Tufted Velvet Living Room Chair and Sauder Harvey Park Coffee Table created the perfect base to our new living room!

Rivet is one of Amazon’s Private Brands. I ended up ordering quite a bit from the brand because of it’s mix of mid-century and industrial modern design. It really checked all of the boxes on our style and quality checklist. Plus, all of the furniture from Rivet comes with a 1-year warranty, free delivery to your room of choice, and 30-day returns, no questions asked.

See more of my picks for the room here!

Once the walls were painted, bookcases painted, and floors finished, we were able to install the entire room in one day.

Stay tuned for my next post where I share the reveal of the full room!

Post in partnership with Amazon Home