Your living/family room should be a place of calm, comfort and relaxation where you can forget about your worries and enjoy quality time with your family. In the ninth edition of our Head-to-Toe Home Reno series, we will give you a few modern updates to help your living/family room remain the oasis you always intended it to be.

Storage Ottomans: Instead of constantly wondering where you put the remote or where the HDMI cord went, keep everything together and organized in a storage ottoman. These nifty pieces of furniture come in all shapes, sizes, colors and materials to fit anyone’s living room décor and budget. Ottomans perfectly combine style and practicality to keep entertainment odds and ends together in one place. Check out Pinterest to get an idea of what you are looking for before heading out to the furniture store.

Entertainment Center: Consider replacing that small tv stand with a larger entertainment center that has plenty of room to house your DVD and video game collection. With various drawers, cubbies and shelves, entertainment centers provide an easy, convenient solution to storing videos, gaming consoles and video games, remotes, extra cables and any other accessory you own. You can find these at large furniture stores as well as department stores like Walmart and Target.

Fireplace: It’s no longer necessary to have a fireplace built into your home during construction. Now, you can get an electric fireplace added to your home whenever you want! Fireplaces add a warm, homey feeling to your living/family room and with modern technology, the electric ones can look pretty realistic. Just imagine curling up with your family next to the warm fire on a cold winter night, watching your favorite movie and creating a wonderful shared memory. Large stores like Walmart and Home Depot carry tons of different styles, but you can also research some smaller, local heating stores that might have just what you’re looking for.

Accent Chairs: A great way to add some flair to your living/family room with ease is incorporating some accent chairs that are covered in bold patterns and colors. Accent chairs come in different styles so you don’t have to do away with your beloved rocking chair or recliner. Visit stores like Target and Wayfair to see tons of the different options available.

Floor Length Curtains: A simple trick to making your living/family room look larger is having floor-length curtains. Doing so tricks the eye into thinking the window is larger than it is and, in turn, makes the room appear larger. We tend to equate the size and position of a window with the size of a room so making the windows look as large as possible does the same with the room itself. You can find curtains for relatively cheap at large department stores like JCPenney, Bed Bath & Beyond and Target.

Accent Wall: Bring the focus to one central element by creating an accent wall. This can be accomplished by adding a material like brick, wainscoting, shiplap or stone to a wall. A simpler way to do this would be painting one wall a solid color or bold pattern that is different from the rest. Pinterest has hundreds of ideas for you to look at and see what would work best for your personality and style.

Come back next week and we’ll explore renovation and storage ideas for your main floor bathroom. See you then!