For a while I had the idea that I'd be posting before and after pictures. Now that we're a month into owning and updating our home, I realize that I may never have true "after" pictures. I've been holding off until we got this project done or that project completed. In some cases the project is just unpacking boxes! With that in mind, I realized I needed to do "progress" pictures.
Let's start with the living room and dining room. That's the space where we started working and it was the first to be fully finished. Well, the painting was fully finished first. Nothing in the house is fully, fully finished.
As a reminder, her are the befores. There were things I loved and didn't love in this big room. Although not traditional, I loved having a fan in the dining room. It's obviously new, and as a Southern girl, I know the value of a good ceiling fan, even if every interior decorator out there might beg to differ. I loved the chair railing in this room and the crown molding that we are lucky enough to have throughout the whole house, even the basement! The floors, while laminate, are a pretty color and are pretty perfect for us with little kids. Maybe someday down the road we'll put in hardwoods, but at this point they'd probably just get ruined. So a pretty wood laminate is perfect for us.
What I did not like about the room was the colors. Baby blue on bottom and a yellowish, minty kind of pale green on top. I'm also not a big fan of popcorn ceilings, although throughout the house. While scraping the ceilings was on our original list of things to get done before we moved in, my parents convinced us to put it off for fear that they are likely asbestos ceilings. We finally agreed. I'm actually glad that we did because we ended up having no extra time to tackle the project that popcorn ceilings would have been.
Here's a quick shot standing in the dining room and looking into the living room and beyond that, the foyer.
Oh, and here's the cute picture of Walter and me, excited for our new house. Now you know our secret that hidden under some blue paint is the date we bought our house, painted on the wall in the same blue paint. :)
So here's what we ended up doing in there. Basically, we painted! Actually, that makes it sound a lot simpler than it was. As I've mentioned before, the walls weren't in great shape, although this room was much better than others. Still, we did a fair amount of spackling and sanding to smooth the walls and went over all the moldings (three sets in this room!) with caulk so that they looked seamless when painted. This is the one room that has the window trim painted, too. It's really not noticeable in any of the before pictures, but most of the trim in the house was a pale grayish/greenish color. Not pretty. And the problem was the color under that was an oil-based paint, so the grayish-greenish color (a latex-based paint) was peeling off. As a result, we had to kilz all the trim before we put on our paint/primer combo. These are all steps that I hadn't planned on and reasons why it's good we didn't take on those ceilings.
For this room I went with this dusty blue on top and bright white on the bottom. I love how crisp it looks. I had already thought that black accents would look nice in the room, so it's lucky for me that the couches and ottoman we've had for 9 years happen to be black. We set up our kitchen table in the dining room. We decided the kitchen would feel pretty cramped if we our table for 6 in the eat-in area. Next we set up two short bookcases (you can only see one in the picture) in the nook area of the living room where our t.v. and t.v. stand will eventually go. We are still living in the dark ages with old-school t.v.s, so we have decided it's time to update ourselves to a flat-screen. (Actually we bought it today for Walter's b-day! But this picture was taken a few days ago...) Next, my grandma offered to buy us a rug as a house-warming gift. Within the budget she set, I found this navy and off-white rug for in here as well as a more durable rug for the playroom! I was worried that the off-white would look dingy in the room with the bright-white on the walls, but it doesn't bother me at all. You can see that although we cleared out the work station that was in here for a while even after we moved in, we still left out some basic tools that we're keeping in the bookcases for now so that we can have quick access to them while we work on other projects we want to complete before Luke is born.
1. Eventually clear out the remaining tools in the bookshelves and have something, well, prettier there. Prettier, but still baby-proof. Ideas? :)
2. Curtains! We kept the curtain rods they had up. They were gold with white lace curtains stapled to them in swags. I want to spray the rods black and find some slightly sheer white curtains. I found some I like but the curtain rods are actually pretty big in diameter. So I don't think the rings will fit on the curtain rods well. Still working out my options on that...
3. Get the t.v. set up and figure out what we're going to do for a t.v. stand. I found a t.v. stand that I really like that I would love for Walter to build. :) It has faux apothecary drawers that would match our end tables. Walter is definitely up for building things for our house, but I don't think he loves it as much as I do. I think he wants something more modern. So we'll see where things fall on this one.
4. Get things up on the walls. That will happen over time, I suppose. It's going to be hard to stop working on projects after the baby is born and I need to rest for a while. But I figure I can do a little of this during that time. For one thing, I have a big, black frame that has spots for lots of pictures in it. I've never filled it with pictures, so that seems like a good post-baby project for me. :)
5. I found some stick-on ceiling tiles that we talked about using. They can be painted to look like tin-tiles, but I'd paint them white to match the room. I think they'd look really nice in here and would add an architectural element.
6. Oh yeah, we need to put the plates back on all the outlets and switches. We would have done that already, but we'd like to replace the tan ones with white ones, which makes it a bigger project than just replacing the plates because we actually have to get a little into electrical to replace the actual switches and plugs.
I think that's it. Well, until we find more things we want to do, of course! :)
This room looks awesome. I love the contrast between the blue and white. I also really like the chair rail and how half of the wall is white. It just has such a custom look to it. The rug also
ReplyDeletelooks very nice.