A Do-It-Yourself Living Room

D has diligently been reading Apartment Therapy and come up with some really interesting ways to do our living room. We both love books (remember this?) and wanted them to take front and center in our room. Of course, we also need a place for the TV, various players, and unsightly cables. And we don't have the money for a custom-made wall unit.

After a thorough measuring session, we made a scale blue-print of what we want to end up with, so there will hopefully be no surprises (our scanner isn't plugged in yet, so I'm photographing everything):

Basically, we want to have covered cabinets below the TV and then shelving everywhere else. D read that a great value for 132'' of cabinet is to actually use the wall cabinets from Ikea's Akurum kitchens. We're using the one that looks something like this:

It will be on 8'' legs to rise above our baseboard heating and the doors will have hardware that will hopefully make it look less kitchen-y. Here is the current state of said cabinets:

 

Oh Ikea! Your flat-packed boxes and assembly-required pieces are always such a joy...

For shelving, D found an ingenious system from The Container Store that only requires us to put one line of screws into the wall, instead of in every level of shelving (neither of us wanted to ruin our newly-painted walls).

The Elfa shelving system all hangs from one strip at the top, which can be hidden by a shelf. The vertical strips will be visible, but we plan on sufficiently covering them with books and clutter. Elfa supposedly doesn't need to go into any wall studs, but we are trying to locate a few anyway. 2 full-length and 2 half-length shelves full of books all held up on a tiny strip of screws sounds both miraculous and scary. Instead of using Elfa's cheap-looking veneer shelves (which are over-priced anyway), we're going to buy untreated pine and stain it ourselves.

So with Ikea cabinets on the bottom and Elfa shelving on top, I think we have a plan for one wall. We're even leaving room for a larger TV, in case we ever decide to upgrade.

We are also test-driving curtains and trying to decide between sheer and heavy:

For now, inspired by a design magazine someone gave me, we're going to try several panels of sheers with a thick gray panel on each end, all on one bar. We've tentatively decided that our colors for the room would be brown, teal (check out that rug!) and burnt/brick red. But I couldn't find a single set of curtains that pulled in two of those colors, so rather than have a brown on brown area (curtains and sofa), we're sticking to grays that complement the walls. All those colors together seems to look OK so far, but suggestions, as always, are very appreciated.