Affordable Style: Gray and Gold

Nobody will be shocked to hear that I like this room:

It's GRAY! With a gallery wall! And white trim! And some gold! Come to my house, dear family room. I promise I'll never eat chips and salsa near you; I'll only read books and tell you how pretty you are.

Sometimes I try to push my boundaries a little with this Affordable Style series (remember the room with the purple couch?) but it's also good to work on things that are legitimately my taste. I feel like if you spend all of your time challenging yourself, then you'll start to forget what you actually like the most. Where you live should reflect you, not a mishmash of things that looked cool in theory.

Anyway! I'm getting off track. I like gray, so we're going to take this snazzy gray room and recreate it on a budget. Let's see what we need:

>> The sofa ($499) and easy chair ($199) are both from the blue and yellow palace, and they have removable covers that you can just toss in the washing machine. Score. The other big purchase, the rug, isn't outlandishly expensive either ($259, from RugsUSA). The colors are a little more muted, but I think that will actually make it wear better.

>> Isn't that a pretty coffee table? It's also from IKEA (only $60!) and sang its siren song to me as soon as it was introduced. I LOVE the lines, and I'm a sucker for any coffee table with a lower shelf. For a while I really wanted to get it, but since we plan to have a tiny human crawling around in the next couple of years, I figured pointy corners right at a baby's eyeball height would be a bad move. So if you ever buy this, let me know and I can live vicariously through you.

>> Let's talk about the gold accents. The pouf ($110, from Fab.com) and flower arrangement ($20, from Target) add a little bit of warmth and shine. Gold is coming back in a big way, and I like it way more in this instance than I do, say, on a faucet. I'd like this room even more if one or two of the picture frames were gold. (Ooooh!) Another hit of warmth in the room comes from the bamboo shades. The ones above are from Home Depot ($23 and up) and we've been meaning to buy them for, like, a year. Whoops.

>> As for that gallery wall, my favorite places to get inexpensive picture frames are IKEA (the Ribba series has nice clean lines) and thrift stores. If you end up with a bunch of thrifted pieces in different colors, just hit them with a coat of spray paint.

>> And finally, those pillows. The square one ($39) is from West Elm and I actually saw it in person over the weekend. GORGEOUS. The lumbar pillow is from Etsy ($14) and while I haven't seen that one with own eyeballs, I have that same fabric in yellow and it's great.

I did the math and you can get this look for about $1,300--which is actually kind of insane for a whole room of new furniture. So did I convince you that gray is delightful? Are you digging the pops of gold? What's your favorite thing here?