Bold & Eclectic Log Cabin Living Room | The Big Reveal | One Room Challenge

The living room is finished!  We worked on it for the past six weeks for the One Room Challenge and had two big projects to complete.  If you're just visiting from the One Room Challenge linkup, a little history on our home is we've been renovating this log home for a little over three years now, starting with the structure and systems which took a lot of time since we are doing almost everything DIY. It feels so good to have such an important room in the house finally finished.  It's a fun room with lots of meaningful pieces for our family.  Because it's a huge room divided by the main walking path through the house, it's like we did two rooms.  Here's the main living room side.

My vision for this room was a rustic but colorful eclectic space.  It's automatically rustic because this is a log home.  It's no secret that I love color, so each room we have renovated so far is colorful.  I also love elements of traditional, midcentury, boho, global, and lodge design.  I know what we ended up with here may not be traditional log cabin decor and design, but we love it!

Really quick, here is what we started with:

I've always envisioned wood floors and a big antique red Persian rug in this room, so that was my starting point.  Everything else kind of built off that rug.  

We attempted this whole renovation and design with the previous One Room Challenge, but cutting out a huge section of log wall to open the living room to the dining room and installing the new wide plank pine floor took the entire six weeks. You can see all of the details for that Living Room Sort of Reveal here. This time we finished it all!  The most important thing we accomplished was fixing a safety issue, an open staircase.  My amazing husband fabricated and welded this rustic industrial staircase enclosure.

Catch up with all of the project updates and see how we did it:  

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 

And I finally got to paint that staircase wall a big bold color, Great Falls by Sherwin Williams (with 8 drops of black added! it's a long story) and hang the thrifted antique and vintage mirrors I've been collecting over the past few years for this purpose.

I was happy to be able to include this gold upholstered mid century chair that belonged to my grandparents.  I love how it plays with the gold frames and brass accents in the room.  That German cuckoo clock was theirs too!

The other big project we accomplished was installing a mantel on the fireplace using a 100 year old beam that has a great story I told in last week's update.  And my husband also made those awesome steel brackets.

That hammered metal tray holds a lot of treasures that our four kids have gathered from our property, camping, and beach trips. Rocks and leaves and moss covered sticks get added daily.  (plus a super cool thrifted geode!) There's a magnifying glass too so they can examine everything closely whenever they want.

The rest of the room is finished off with lots of thrifted finds that just spoke to me, like all of the blue and white pieces and a Bolivian poncho, family pieces like pottery and vintage glass, and an antique copper fire extinguisher that was a gift from my oldest best friend.

That poncho is on a ladder that was originally attached to the end of one of our porches.  It was too rickety to leave there with our four monkeys who would definitely climb it, but I wanted to honor the history of the house and re-use it somewhere.  

So that's all of that side of the living room!

Ok, I know this is a long post but this is a big room.  This is the other side, grounded by a new leather couch, one of my paintings, and one of my best thrifted finds ever!

We live in coastal North Carolina and the water is part of our life.  One of my favorite scenes to paint are our local salt marshes and waterways.  When we are out on the water I love to take pictures to paint later.  I call this one Storm Moving In.  The shadows from the clouds that day turned the water gorgeous navy and deep turquoise.

And I can't say enough about how much I love that vintage Sarreid brass trunk I recently found at a yard sale.  I told its story here in my week 3 update.

I know usually I would be giving sources for the things in the room at this point, but there are so few things I can do that with since pretty much everything was either made by us, thrifted, gifted or hand-me-down.  I'm cool with that though. And I guess that's my usual decorating philosphy.  Use pieces that speak to you and pieces that have importance to you. I love finding things like that brass chest, the rug, place mats I made into pillows, a funky vintage olive velvet chair, a vintage crewel embroidery piece (for $1.80), and combining them with my grandma's end table, the lamp my husband's family gave us for our 5th anniversary almost 15 years ago, and an antique dough bowl he bought me last year (because he knew I wanted one) that I filled with white starfish from a local beach shop.  (That may be my longest sentence ever!)   It's bold and colorful, rustic, eclectic... do you have any other adjectives to describe it????  Basically this room is the story of our family and I love that. Also I was mortified to discover while I was editing my pictures for this post that there is a tiny LEGO creation under the gold chair.  I seriously considered editing it out, but hey I have three little boys and things like that are real life!

So we are done with the biggest room in the house and it feels great!  I can't wait to move on to more rooms now.  Thanks so much for checking out our renovation progress!  And please go see all of the amazing room renovations that are linked up to the One Room Challenge.  There are well over 200 rooms that give so much creative inspiration!