Unless you are secretly very wealthy, I'm going to assume that your living room isn't as large as most of the spaces that you'll eventually be recording in, and that it's furnished in a more or less typical way as well.
The thing is, the acoustical surroundings in which you make a recording are what makes the major difference among the different recording techniques and microphone choices that are available. Probably the biggest thing that beginners don't realize (present company excluded, of course) is the enormous extent to which we are actually recording the room whenever we record an event.
If sound traveled in a straight line from the source to the nearest microphone, and if it arrived only that one time at that one microphone, then what you hear in your living room would be a generally accurate predictor of what you'd get in a real performance venue, and all our audio choices would be far simpler than they really are. Of course, the recordings would also sound as if they'd been made with spot mikes in anechoic chambers (super-dry "ping-pong" stereo, or what some people call "multiple mono").
Instead, however, the majority of all the sound energy that ever reaches your microphones (at the usual recording distances) in a large space has already bounced off of one or more room boundaries, objects, or people. It has been variously delayed, diffused, and absorbed by different amounts at different frequencies along the way. And nearly all of the sound energy, whether direct or reflected, reaches both your microphones (or all of them, if you're using more than two), although rarely at exactly the same time.
This extremely complex way of gathering sound energy in stereo is then interpreted by our ears and brain during playback. The way that occurs is mainly dependent on the room and how you are working within it. The signals from the very same microphones can "work" on the listeners' ears' very differently in different rooms, as well as with different placements and orientations within the same room.
There are definitely some things that you can learn by trying out a pair of microphones in your living room. But unless you plan to specialize in living room recording, many of the most important qualities of your microphones (or of possible microphone setups) will only become apparent when you use them in acoustical settings that have more in common with typical performance spaces.
--best regards