Lighten Up Decor for Spring

Spring is a time for Passover and Easter and things blooming…a time for renewal. It’s also a time when I start thinking about how to refresh my home and, more specifically, making the decor lighter and brighter. There are so many affordable ways to lighten up decor for spring! Today, I’m focusing on our living room, explaining what I’ve done already to lighten and brighten and what I have planned. Then, in a later post, I’ll give you my favorite tips for how to lighten up decor for spring!

Here’s what our living room looked like last fall:

I’ve already changed the rug in this room, which I talked about in this post about what to splurge on and what to save on in home decor. And I moved the gray recliner – which is a BIG chair! – into our family room and replaced it with this navy blue armchair (purchased at HomeGoods, FYI):

You can see how I made the faux fur-covered footstool in this post.

Also, remember how I made over the fireplace in our living room? That brass insert wasn’t doing this room any favors!

The new fireplace screen I made from an old window screen definitely fits more with the age and style of our home and is way better than that brass insert!

So far, so good, right?!?

Next, I swapped out the pillows on the couch: from warm, fall-toned reds and oranges to brighter, crisper navy and white.

The pillows are from HomeGoods and none of them was more than $25.

As you can see to the left of the couch is an end table that’s metallic and open with a glass top (also from HomeGoods). It’s lighter-looking than a solid, chunky wood end table.

Which got me thinking…the chunky coffee table in the middle of the room isn’t helping create a lighter decor. I’ve had this coffee table for a long time – it was in our first house, too.

But it fit better in that house’s living room, because the room was bigger and more open. Our current living room is much smaller.

So here’s what I’m thinking for the rest of this room’s refresh:

Declutter the built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace;
Paint the back of the shelves in a bright color or use fabric to brighten them, like I did here;
Add a mirror above the fireplace to reflect the light coming in from the windows (currently, I have an old map framed up there – dark frame and the map is dark-looking, too);
Consider getting a new, lighter-looking coffee table.

I’m also going to remove the faux leather armchair from this room. I feel like there’s too much furniture in this room for its size, and I liked having that space a little more open, as it was here: