Hole in the Wall

Our living room used to feel like a hole in the wall until it actually had a hole in the wall.

Really.

For nearly seven years, I put up with a ginormous ugly box TV in the corner of our living room. It was large enough to house a family of chimpanzees inside comfortably.

It wrecked Christmas tree photos and ruined perfectly good decorating space with its hideous space age looking stand and ugly speakers. It blocked an entire window! So when a friend of T's offered to sell us his old flat screen LCD HDTV (that's seriously a lot of letters and I seriously sound like a nerd typing them) for a ridiculously great price because he is young and single and rich and wanted a newer one, I told T to go for it.

Because I'm a good wife who wants her husband to enjoy fine quality television viewing. Not because I hated that ugly box thing in the corner and I wanted to open the space up. 


So here's another before:

(I think the overturned doll stroller in the corner of the photo only adds to the ambiance.)

You know what they say, right? Things sometimes get worse before they get better. Understatement of the century.

So we subtracted a big ugly TV and added a big ugly hole in the wall. I'm not good at math, y'all, but that's pretty bad.

T was so delighted with his craftsmanship of a perfectly shaped hole in the wall with wires poking out everywhere that he decided to leave it on showcase for the entire month of September.

To make matters worse, we could not agree on what to put underneath the TV. I wanted a nice, long media console that would take up most of the wall and really utilize it for storage. T wanted a tiny, dinky media storage unit. Or a hole in the wall.

So this is what it looked like for a month:

Yes, that is my DVR (the one T stole from me during our Verizon fiasco) perched precariously on top of a speaker turned backwards. A more classy media center you'll never find.

If there's one thing I have learned in 9 years of marriage, it is to keep my mouth shut until the right opportunity arrives. The right opportunity arrived on Friday afternoon when I realized that T was in a good mood and it was now or never.

I approached the situation with humor.

Me: Hey, can I talk to you a minute?
T (panicked look on face): Uh, okay.
Me: So, I don't know about you, but I am getting a little tired of looking at the hole in the wall and I thought it might be time to get something to put under the TV and I know you said you only want wood and something small and I think I found something that at least looks like wood and it is small and it fits the decor in here and it has glass doors. (Deep breath, because that was a lot of words)
T: What?! You don't like my hole in the wall? It was perfectly round!
Me: Um, so you seriously aren't tired of it? You've been staring at it for a whole month.
T: No, not really. I'm just happy with the TV.
Me: Okay, well let me just show you this picture of what I want to get.
T (passing glance): Okay, just buy it.
Me: Really?! Okay.
T: Wait a second. It comes already put together, right? It doesn't come in one of those stupid flat cheap boxes, does it?
Me (running out the door): I can't hear you!!

So after some minor cursing and banging on stuff, T put together our new media console thingie, courtesy of one of those "stupd flat cheap boxes" from Target. It's not real wood, or even great quality, but I wanted something to cover up that darn hole in the wall and he flat out refused to budge on my suggestion of purchasing something to stretch across the wall.

I haven't styled it yet, but I plan on introducing an item or two slowly over time. T doesn't want anything to detract from the star of the room, which is his TV. Since it is *his* room, I am being sensitive to his needs by decorating it the way I want slowly over time, as opposed to throwing it all up and scaring him off.

So...big empty space...what do I do with the rest of this wall?!

Your advice is greatly appreciated for this Decorating Dilemma! It's better than a hole in the wall, right?

Linked to Cottage and Vine.