Challenge Turned Inspiration

I confess: I've been watching too much HGTV. We can't get it where we live, so while we're here in the states, I've been sorting of binging. I also confess: I've struggled with a woe is me attitude. First I must say: Our apartment in our country is SO nice. We've got three bedrooms, and everyone who has come to visit us has been really surprised by how nice it is (I think a little part of each of our friends and family believes we live in a hut somewhere in Africa, you know?). I am so grateful for our home. But as many of you know, it's easy to begin to believe the lie that someone else has it better. That what I have is not good enough or pretty enough or new enough or nice enough. Especially if you spend too much time watching HGTV. So the other day I was mentally bemoaning the decorating challenges of our apartment. The bedrooms are small. We don't have closets, therefore we have to have huge armoires (how do you spell that?) in order to have any storage. We have weird concrete/plaster walls and it's hard to hang stuff up. There's no moisture barrier, so any outside walls have issues (i.e. mold grows on our walls sometimes). We have A/C units on the walls because there is no central heat or air where we live. I could go on. But I won't. Because God gave me a gentle prompting the other day that I needed to get over my whiney self and see all of these problems as possibilities. So yeah, it's a bit harder than decorating in the U.S. And yeah, I can't just go to Home Depot or Target, or even WalMart. And yeah, it's really challenging to try to even find a store that sells fabric or drapery hardware. But how boring would that be if I could just walk into one store and buy everything I need?! Then my house would look like everyone else's! It is so much more exciting to decorate when there are some hurdles and challenges to overcome, right? I am honing my skill as a decorator by working in demanding conditions! I am very creative! I can come up with something! I can make the most of any situation! God tells me to rejoice and be glad and to give thanks in every circumstance! And my joy is not directly linked to the convenience or ease of my life! PSHAW!

So then, all of a sudden, I was excited about figuring out better ways to work with what we have and to make it beautiful! So here's what I am going to tackle first. The living room. We painted before we moved in and I'm happy with the color, so we're sticking with that. It's a nice light khaki. Not too yellow, not too grey. Just right. We got our great furniture used, from friends, when we arrived (and they gave it to us at a steal of a price! We have been so grateful for them--furniture is expensive where we live!). Because of the cost of new stuff, and the wear on the stuff we have, we may try to save money and get new stuffing guts put into what we have to make it feel more new. We got a hand-me-down coffee table that is very practical (has lots of storage) so we'll hang onto it. The paper-lantern lighting will have to stay too (the odds that we'll have to move again make investing in getting new fixtures wired kind of a bad idea). We got the rug to match the furniture, so it's staying. What we need to do now is accessorize with some sort of nesting tables (we serve a lot of tea and other hot drinks here, so having a bunch of small tables is really important) and some end tables for some (hopefully) lamps, some curtains, a new console for our TV (because the one we have is way dangerous and top heavy now that we'll be going back with a toddler). Here, why don't you have a look at the room first: Looking into the room, this is what you see. The windows have a rolling shade thing that is actually on the outside of the window, so we use that when we need privacy or shade.

This is the view to the right--this is actually a patio door, and just out of view on the right is the dining room. The patio door also has the rolling shade outside of the door. The white box above the door is because of the rolling shade. Just out of view in this picture is an A/C unit above the door.

Our current sofa pillows and a shot of the rug.

Detail shot of the rug.

Under the rug we have pretty marble floors (I think that's what they are?)


So, here are some of the "challenges":

1. At any time, the landlord could raise the rent and we would have to move, so we need to be smart about anything that is too custom to this space (i.e. we need freestanding furniture and need to do anything like installing curtains on the cheap, and we'll have to take it all down when we move). Anything we do here needs to work other places too because moving often is a reality here.
2. We often have large groups of people over and end up using all of our living room furniture, plus all of our (classy!) plastic chairs that are currently our dining room chairs, and we end up using every bit of space that we have in our living room. We also use our living room as a gym and do lots of workout videos in there and have to scoot all of our furniture out of the way (therefore: no big furniture that eats into the space in the room).
3. As I mentioned above, there's an A/C unit on the wall above the patio door that changes where the curtains could be hung.
4. You may have noticed that there's a weird wall jut (is that how you spell jut?) to the left of the patio door. Originally I wanted to do matching curtains on the window and the patio and take them all the way to the corner where the two meet, but that's not gonna work b/c of the weird wall jut--if we do curtains on the patio door, we'll have to hang them really narrow, inside where the wall comes out.
5. When you first look into the room, you see the living room and the dining room all at once and there is another patio door out to the same patio that comes off of the dining room. Does that mean i need to put matching curtains on the dining room patio door, if i put curtains on the living room patio door?

That's all i can think of for now. . . I was thinking of buying fabric for the curtains while we're here in the states, and I have the measurements of the window and the door, can someone tell me what the formula is for how much fabric I need? Is it the width of the opening, plus half again?

Tell me what you think . . . Also fabric color suggestions are very welcome as well! We are going through Atlanta next week and I'm hoping to buy the fabric there, so I've got to figure all of this out fast. Also, I would love to find some amazingly on sale cheap fabric to upholster some imaginary dining room chair bottoms--anyone know how much fabric I should get for each chair I would want to buy and cover? Just in case I find some amazingly on sale?