The living room gets loud

Part of our multi-step “Big Move of 2025” required moving our sleeper sofa from the upstairs guest room into the downstairs living room. Great opportunity to redesign the space for our family’s next kids-only-no-babies chapter!

Skip ahead to see some (1) very satisfying before & afters , (2) the initial design inspiration , and (3) fun(ctional) projects in the space !

Before & After

Our living room wasn’t bad before, it was just bare bones to accommodate tiny babies. Since our boys are now kids, I thought our living room should feel more like the cozy family hangout space that we actually use it for.

Notice that we kept the corner plant , coffee table, couches, and blanket/books storage shelf (for now)! The two wall sconces were removed and replaced with switch-enabled outlets.

We removed that great-for-childproofing-tchotchkes wall shelf because I kept hitting my head on it while picking up toys and because it was blocking us from adding curtains to the side window. We moved the plants into rail-mounted planters (aren’t they awesome?!), but kept the toys in the same place since it’s still the perfect spot for them.

The Design

My Havenly designer, Mercedes Platas, is a genius. Her design incorporated the sleeper sofa, existing sofas, and art from Elena Kotliarker that I had been eyeing for years. I never would have known how good ochre (yellow) curtains could look in this room!

The dimensions weren’t quite right (probably my mistake), and the sofa table and rug runner (left ) didn’t actually fit, but I like the vibe!

The Details

Home takes time. Our living room is now in a semi-stable state, but I’ll continue to adapt it to fit our family’s changing needs! Keep reading about my functional solutions for this room:

• hanging a gallery wall
• leveling furniture on slanted floors
• customizing bay window curtain rods
• installing lighting in a tree
• soundproofing a staircase

Evolution of the Gallery Wall

Iteration 1. When my husband and I first moved in together once we were married , we each came with a random assortment of artwork from our travels. I combined it all into a gallery wall in our first apartment in Northampton, MA by laying the artwork out on the floor onto craft paper, tracing the art, then taping the paper to the wall to put nails in.

Iteration 2. I repeated the process when we moved into our tiny Cambridgeport apartment in 2018.

Iteration 3. And finally! Here is the gallery wall in our current condo. Hanging all this over the staircase while keeping our necks intact was… not guaranteed… This time, I drew level +’s all over the craft paper and measured 40” up from the stairs in order to lay the art out to arrange. I also changed the wall color from BM Stokes Forest Green to BM Ash Blue, which (I think…? ) works better in this north-facing room.

3D-Printed Furniture Levels

Who knew that the floor in our 1890 condo could slant so much?! I guess I did.… The front of the sofa in the bay window was nearly two inches lower than the back. (1) I tried stacking furniture protector pads, which slid out of place and left sticky residue on the floor. (2) Then I got anti-slip furniture casters and wobble wedges, which were much better but kept collapsing… (3) Finally, I designed frames for the wobble wedges on TinkerCad and 3D printed them in wood+PLA filament. Success!

Bay Window Curtains

Our design renderings immediately convinced me that this project was worth it.

Step 1. Planning! (of course) I taped some craft paper to the ceiling of the bay window nook to copy the exact size and angles.

Step 2. Cut once, curse twice? I used my tabletop saw with metal-cutting blade to cut the curtain rods to size (accounting for the wall-to-rod distance of the curtain hooks), and connected the angles using these clever angle connectors.

Step 3. Marvel at accomplishment. Ta da!

Lighting in a Tree

I had two (annoyingly placed) wall sconces removed and replaced with switch-operated outlets. The plant corner was too dark, though, so I installed four Shepherd’s hooks directly into the plant pot and strung up pendant light sockets. I experimented with different bulbs, and finally settled on low wattage, frosted bulbs that diffuse light , aren’t blindingly bright at eye level , and still look okay exposed during the daytime.

Soundproofing the Staircase

We live in a condo unit above and next to others. The neighbor who shares a wall with us could hear every step we took up and down the stairs. After discussing the feasibility of different solutions for dampening impact noise , I decided to install polyester stair treads and acoustic panels to the backs of our stairwell art. Unfortunately (though, unsurprisingly), this made no difference for our neighbor, but it helped reduce our perception of external noise!

Cost

Did I intend to redo the living room this year? Nope. Remember that we were already installing a custom wardrobe and redoing the master bedroom and my kiddo’s bedroom during the Big Move of 2025…

However, once I heard the quote for moving the sleeper sofa (see below), I realized that it was now or never to replace the area rug, since we’d never move that couch again. The process snowballed into changing up the entire room.

Here’s one last “after” pic, though, to convince you (/me?!) that it was all worth it!

Shilpa Kobren is the Associate Director of Rare Disease Analysis at Harvard Medical School where she focuses on analyzing genomic sequencing data with patient clinical information to derive insights into human diseases. Shilpa lives in an 1890s urban apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two energetic toddlers. She retains her sense of peace amid the chaos by creating and iteratively improving systems that optimize daily efficiency in her family's constrained living space.