DIY living room ideas

About a week ago, I posted about things that I wanted to incorporate into my new living room. Back then, we had a few basic pieces but were still looking for a lot of furniture to make the place more functional (aka, we had no storage in the kitchen and the dining room table we're borrowing from a friend is waaaaaay too big for the space).

Well, this weekend my housemate and I went thriftin and scored some amaaaaazing deals. I'm talkin one huge, 6-drawer dresser with a marble top (which we'll use in the kitchen as butcher block basically), a nice round table with drop eaves, 2 bulletin boards which we plan to cover in fabric for the living room, a crappy canvas that we're going to repaint, plus a sheet set (we're using it to cover our futon in a pretty blue instead of the overly dark purple it came in and are making throw pillows with the pillowcases/extra flat sheet) all for......drumroll please....$75! We shop, we score!

Of course, $20 dining tables don't come looking so pretty, so we'll need to put a little extra money in to buy sandpaper, primer, and paint to dress it up a little. While we're at that, we decided to tackle a couple other DIY projects....here's our inspiration:


This room, while it will look absolutely nothing like our living room, has a lot of ideas we will incorporate, namely: fancy mirror, big colorful rug, pattern in the big fabric pieces (although I'm assuming in the photo it's wallpaper) plus a hot chandelier, comfy couch with lots of colorful pillows and a throw blanket.

We're planning on getting one of those mirrors you always see at thrift stores with the gold gilt edge and painting it a bright color, like so:

Then we plan to write a quote or lyrics on the mirror itself, either with permanent marker, stickers, or by using this awesome spray paint I just got that makes glass look etched. See inspiration photo below:

Then, we have the stereotypical Lack coffee table from IKEA (not my first choice, obviously, but hey it was free when our old roomate moved out), which I plan to hack by painting a design on top, possibly something like shown below:

(PS sorry for using this image a million times and never sourcing it....I just love it so much!)

Then, since we don't have enough projects on our hands, we're going to paint the new dresser as I mentioned....it's marble on top so we won't be painting that but I think we'll end up painting the drawer fronts and maybe doing something like they did here around the handles to dress it up a bit:

Then our last three projects in the works are pretty simple: we have a long skinny slice of wall betwen two doors, which I think would be perfect to make an organized wall collage of pictures like the one on the bottom left-most part of this shot:

And in an attempt to bring more color to the otherwise white and black room, we are going to make some of these paper poofs (really easy to make: styrofoam ball, cut tissue paper, hotglue to ball):

We also have an old chandelier that my roomate found in a dumpster which we plan to paint, but haven't decided on a color. Considering our color scheme thus far is white walls, black coffee table/loveseat, futon covered in aqua fitted sheet, and a few random green, yellow, and orange accents, I think that it would look awesome with a deep peacock blue/teal, which I also want to use to paint accents on our soon-to-be white dining table. What do you think? Go bold, or go safe, like with a nice basic black or glossy laquered white?

I can't wait to get started!