Recently I posted about how we moved the fabulous vintage bar cabinet into the family room as a media console. It’s been a great change. It’s fitting to have one of your favorite pieces of furniture where you spend the most time. For us, that’s in the open family room & kitchen area.
The cabinet is large and deep enough to easily house our gadgets (and our bar!) and fits the space nicely. Can you believe that it used to be a sad, unwanted, worn, black cabinet? I love transformations like this one.
The only problem was that the wall still looked very bare. We needed some accessories to truly bring this piece home, and accessorizing is certainly a weakness of mine that I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on to improve.
I had fallen in love with this clover mirror from Target, but didn’t know where to put it. This was the perfect opportunity because I love how the interesting shape breaks up all of the blocked out shapes on the wall… the cabinet, the TV, the speakers.
The girls had recently done a fairy-themed “mini shoot” (although if you ask them, they were butterflies) and this created the perfect opportunity to display those photos. I picked my favorite photo of each girl and had them enlarged in black and white to fit some frames from Aaron Brothers (remember to use a coupon!).
From experience, I’ve found that things look nice in sets of three. 2 frames + 1 mirror = 3. I love how the subtle, antiqued gold of the mirror plays with the antiqued silver of the frames next to the chrome lights. It’s mixed metals, but not in-your-face.
Then accessorizing the cabinet just sort-of fell into place. On the left, I used a tray from Target that I bought last fall that was intended for the steamer trunk coffee table in the living room. It didn’t work out in there like I had planned, but worked perfectly in the family room.
It’s a great way to store a few things (yes, 3 again!) and easily move them should we open up 
the bar top.
I love that quirky frog vase and was annoyed that I hadn’t found a home for it in the new house yet. It’s from One Kings Lane if you’re looking to source it.
The frame was a Home Goods find, it’s from Jonathan Adler’s “Happy Chic” line. I used it to put one of the girls’ favorite photos at their eye level.
The plant is an orchid that I have yet to get to re-bloom. It seems that with orchids, it’s a matter of finding their happy place. Maybe this will be it! If not, it’ll move to another spot again.
Every orchid needs a good luck charm, right? Well, probably not, but this one does. Or so my mother told me when she plopped this guy in there years ago.
We received a Christmas Cactus as a gift over the holidays and it works beautifully on the other side of the cabinet along with a vase that I’ve been carrying around from house to house, determined to make a fun DIY project out of it. You might be able to see the swirled sharpie in some places where it has not worn off. That was an old idea for glass etching that never came to fruition.
I mentioned in the last post about the IR blaster we needed to get the rest of our components working behind a closed door. You can see it here on top of our center speaker (which I’m determined to “pretty up” at some point once some inspiration strikes me.
When you’re mounting a TV high on the wall, a tilting mount works great for getting it “just-so”.
Remember this lion knobs I painted nearly a year ago? They are still holding up great! Here’s the most-used one:
…and another shot of inside where our components live in case you missed the earlier post about when we converted this vintage cabinet into a media cabinet. Most of what we watch is stored digitally so we only have a few disks. It has really stayed this clean and tidy the entire time. Great solution!
So there’s an update on the family room media wall. I especially love it now that we’ve added more personal touches!
