I put in houzz and it worked

So I think we have decided to stick with the layout that we have and just block up the double doors. I hope it and it will be nice because I have lost a lot of sleep worrying about it. Thanks for letting me post here.

I've been abroad for 7 years, and I'm slowly moving into an older apartment in Boston. I have to buy all new furniture and decorations, so I'm taking my time to plan out a home I'll really appreciate. I love the picture frame mouldings in my new living room, but there are some features I want to accentuate and others I want to deemphasize. The paint job isn't great, and the walls have a very strange uneven texture with some obvious patching. They're currently eggshell or semigloss, and I want to paint them with a flat or velvet paint. I also want to highlight the mouldings and make it less of a pure white expanse. I'm leaning into the gray that's already there and am gonna attempt bit of an art deco feel with some gold decorations. To that end, I want to paint the walls with a very light grey, and I'd like to see what others think of my options. Real Photos (pardon the camp furniture): I Photoshopped 3 possible ways to paint the white walls: A: paint outside the frames B. paint inside and outside the frames C. paint everything except the top and bottom trim. If it helps, this is where I'm at with my plan in 3D: It's long enough to do a combo living/dining room. I haven't gotten any furniture, yet, so this is just FPO. I'm stuck with one of those wooden boxes with a grate over the radiator by the windows. This is my first post, so thank you for any advice!

Thanks for your ideas, Siobhan. So one of the reasons we want to open up the space is because the back of the house faces due south which results in the living room being pretty dark (despite large window). The space is also not particularly big and we do prefer more open plan living. There would be an RSJ running the width of the house so we could always add doors or a stud wall down the line if we felt we needed it. Our plan for now is to use screening to separate the two areas while keeping them open to one another (floor to ceiling shelves or vertical slats for example). The space with a "B" you see in the original floor plan is actually a small room that used to house the (gigantic) old boiler, but is now a large void in the centre of the house. This will be removed. It's load bearing, hence the RSJ. I can't really think of a kitchen configuration that doesn't need to use some of that space (what you see in the drawing is a fridge and pantry beside one another surrounded by a stud wall). Removing it, even partially, enables us to steal back some of the void for the living room. The living itself room is a nice size and width, but you're right, the off centre fireplace does make it slightly awkward to lay it out in a way that makes sense. The bay window is almost full height and beneath it is a low radiator, so no space for built in seating unfortunately. Our current thought here is to have a corner couch along the hall wall and coming down in front of the winow. Then have a console table behind the couch below the window, plants etc. We've tried it and it makes the room feel a lot better, but you then lose that extra space by the window. Alternative is just to have two 3 seater couches, one along the hall wall, and one under the window. Decisions, decisions :D Plan is indeed to have a WC under the stairs (at some point down the line).