Navy Blue and Teal Living Room Ideas

I have an obsession with rearranging my house. I feel like by simply rearranging a room, you can avoid spending a ton of money at the home goods store – until your furniture and decor can no longer be rearranged. Then you have no choice but to splurge on some new goodies for the home, right? My husband (or Mr. bachelor pad, as I call him) would disagree. So, needless to say, he wasn’t ecstatic about my idea to do a navy blue and teal living room update.

My dark brown sectional was like an elephant in the room so I had to come up with a way to change the vibes in my playroom turned living room. This room went from bright and cheery, to a total bachelor pad with an oak piano, dark brown tv stand, dark brown couch and a tan rug. It needed some color! So, I started with pillows to see how the navy blue and teal vibes were. I’m all about room vibes, if you can’t tell. I spent about $100 at Home Goods on five new pillows in the navy blue, ivory and teal hues.

Then, I teamed up with Minted (affiliate) for the artwork. They gave me a $500 credit to purchase art for my new gallery wall. I know, how generous of them, right? THANKS, MINTED! After hours and hours of searching, I came up with the perfect layout for my new navy blue and teal living room. See my original “before” post here.

I wanted to find a way to incorporate a travel theme into my living room so I used two photos that I had taken on a trip to Mexico. The cow and the coconut are mine and the rest are from artists on Minted.com (affiliate).

Techniques for Hanging A Gallery Wall

Once I clicked “order” on the Minted website, all there was left to do was actually hang the prints. Minted made it easy by allowing me to order the prints in the frames, which also included the hardware. I admit, I freaked out a little bit once it came time to hang the prints on the wall.

I’ve seen so many different ways to layout a gallery wall before actually putting the nails in the wall but all of them were time consuming and hard to do with the kids crawling on me. The most popular option was to cut out sheets of paper that were the same size as each print. You then place the cutouts on the wall and rearrange them as needed. You can find lots of tutorials for this method on Pinterest.

I had already figured out the gallery wall arrangement on my own using PicMonkey but I had to figure out the exact spacing on the wall. I put a piece of string down the center of the wall and pretty much eye-balled it from there (classy, I know). I also used push pins to hand the prints before putting nails in the wall, just to get an idea of how it would all look on the wall (doubly classy). Once I was ready to commit to the placement of the prints, I pulled the push pins out and replaced them with nails.

On my latest trip to World Market I found a navy blue map that was missing the glass. It was discounted from $149 to $89 but I was able to get it reduced to $60 since there was damage on the matte. I feel like it went really well with my travel themed gallery wall and added a little bit of masculinity to the room.

Overall, I’m really happy with my play room to living room transformation. I feel like we use this room so much more now that the TV is in there and the drab dark brown couch is such a cozy, happy place to hang out.