A visit to our living room

We changed a few things in the living room this year, the most obvious being our new, humongous TV. This Christmas we upgraded our 20-something-inch box to a 47-inch flat screen. I must confess that all huge TVs look pretty much the same to me. 38, 45, 52, 69, whatever. But the point is that now we can watch actors whose heads appear four times larger than life, which is super important.

The new TV created a problem for us, though. It wouldn't fit in the cheap, ugly cabinet that housed our old TV along with a metric ton of board games and movies. Our requirements for a new entertainment center were: has storage, can stand in a corner, preferably no wider than the TV, looks at least somewhat modern, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. And that, my friends, is a challenge. After visiting four or five furniture stores with a tape measure and looking at every TV console on the internet, we ended up at trusty IKEA where we bought two pieces of furniture and stacked them: the Besta Boas and the Besta Adal. And then we attached a mounting bracket and slid the TV in with a shoehorn. I share all this in case you, too, are looking for entertainment center options. We love how this worked out.

Our other newish items include:
The Avenue Six Wall Street Coffee Table. Don't ever buy this. It took three tries to get a table shipped to us that didn't have damaged corners. And within weeks, the veneer started peeling off like a bad sunburn—whether you touched the table or not.

The Array bookcase in red from CB2, my favorite thing in the room when Alex is not present.

The Milliken Modern Times Uptown rug. Huge carpets usually cost a million dollars, give or take a few thousand, but we found this 8' x 11' rug when it was on sale for around $200. It comes in other colors, too.

Other cost-saving rug tips: Check out other styles by Milliken, including some solid options. Or stitch a few smaller rugs together like this. Or, enter a new giveaway I'm posting on Monday. Stay tuned!