How to make your room bigger

The red rug in our living room was a discount buy that I have regretted for years. It started shredding at the corners within months of purchasing it. Therefore vacuuming it became particularly challenging (occasionally I would forget to be careful, drag the vacuum to the corner, and suck up a nasty chunk of threads) and small red yarns made it to every room of the house. This, for example, was one of the better corners:

Unfortunately I could not find a rug in a similar color that I liked. I'd been checking all the usual suspect websites for a few seasons, to no avail. And then, this weekend, we wandered into an estate sale...The rug must have been meant to be because it was still waiting for us the following day when we went back to see if they would take less (and, in fact, it already had been marked 50% off, which was exactly what we wanted to pay). And so with a little muscle, we had it rolled, into the car, and then into our house.

One problem:

Yeah, it's a little big.

We knew that already, of course. We knew that our red rug was 5'x8'. And we measured for the 8'x'10 on Saturday and new it fit tightly, if at all. But it was a beautiful Bokhara rug made in Pakistan. The first "Persian" style rug that I ever liked, mostly because it was very simple. And, even better, it was only $300, which was far cheaper than even smaller, less high quality rugs at stores I'd been checking out like Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel.

So we resorted to the back-up plan. The sitting area of our living room had a little extra space to work with.

In fact, it fit fabulously! Just under the front legs of the sofas - enough to tie the space together (and also to anchor it in place until we get a rug pad). I was worried that such a big rug, especially a patterned rug, would make the room feel small. But in fact, we now essentially have more usable space in the living room because we usually tried to stay on the rug (especially now with the baby requiring a little extra padding while she learns to roll over) and so we now have a few extra square feet to work with, right up to the furniture.

And the teal rug works well in the entry way. Though now the room color scheme is a little too divided, with blue on one half and red on the other (there's a red fan above the fireplace, if you recall). So I have to try to bring more blue elements to the sitting area.

Sadly, I think the best way to do that is to refinish the coffee table, which now clashes with the rug in a slightly different shade of red. Refinishing it the first time was awful, but hopefully the current paint job will act as a base coat to prevent some of the problems that I encountered. Or the project will end with me throwing the table to the curb in a fit of rage and hitting Craigslist for something else. But either way, teal is the name of the game.