Livingroom Reveal

This was the biggest project I've ever done. Holy crap this was a beast and the fact that it's *done is such a relief.

*The asterisk is that we are going to install wood floors throughout the first floor.  But I promised Tom we'll enjoy the holidays with a clean house.  So the wood floors will wait until January.

Let's get started.

Here's the before:

The different colored wall issue that I had in my kitchen continued into my living room.  The top half was a tan with a chair rail around most of the walls and a darker tan on the bottom half.  And then some walls were just the darker brown for some reason.  Really random and really hard for me to look at.

This room went through such a process and so many tiny little changes it would be hard to document them all.

Here is a bird's eye view of what our living room looked like for a really long time.  It's a really small space and we want to eventually get another sofa or overstuffed chair for that wall on the left.  We had this big, pretty bookshelf but there was no where for it to go.  Our office has built in shelves, none of the rooms upstairs are big enough, and it wouldn't fit down our basement stairs.  So I sold it along with our Ikea rug.

Here is our living room with our new rug, blinds, and half painted.

I wanted to really lighten up this room and accentuate the high ceilings and natural light.  I also wanted to frame out the windows to give it a more finished feel.  

At first I picked the color on the bottom. (The color right above it is SW Alpaca)  It's a behr color and looked really pretty. So I had a gallon mixed up, brought it home, and started painting.  And it was purple. It doesn't look too purple in this picture. But trust me. My whole house would have been lavender and I would have cried every day.

The color I used in the end is called Alpaca by Sherwin Williams. 

It's a really perfect color.  It's gray with beige undertones so it's still warm and in some lighting looks like a warm white.  It does have lavender undertones in some light but that's a little of what I was going for. 

I decided to paint this room slowly.  I knew it was going to take a long time so I started in August.  I would spend a day painting one entire wall.  Removing everything, sanding, patching, edging, rolling, and when it was done, I would put everything back and clean all the paint supplies up.  This way we didn't have to live in a construction zone for months.  

I took a picture of my gallery wall, took it all down, left the holes, painted, and then put it back up.  Pretty simple. It only took a day.

The paint looks pink here... but it is not.

All the wood for framing the windows.

Once I had done everything I could reach, we rented scaffolding and spent the day painting, framing windows, and finishing up everything.

Look at how much wider the lower window looks than the top window.  Framing them out made them look so much bigger than they are.

The only picture I have of the 2nd story scaffolding is a snapchat Tom took. Sorry.  That was so high and scary we were just focusing on finishing.

Since there are so many windows, I wanted a sort of clean craftsman look.  Otherwise it could look too busy.

I can't even tell you the difference this makes in this room.  I painted the inside of the frames white and it opens up the windows and makes them look even bigger. (nighttime picture because it's impossible to see the details with the sun shining through them)

My mother-in-law bought us this mirror before we were married.  I have been dying to hang it over my fireplace but wanted to wait until I had painted and we could secure it into studs because it weighs probably over 200 pounds. 

Even though our house style is a little more modern/midcentury/industrial, I love the juxtaposition a classic mirror brings in.  Too much of one style is too much in my opinion.  I'm a mixer through and through.

I have already added some shelves above this little area since taking these pictures last week. I haven't gotten any good pictures yet so I'll post them later.  This is the wall the bookshelf used to sit on.  And these ghost chairs... Those are a story for another day :)

I also painted our fireplace white back in March.

It is amazing how much brighter it is in here!  

Here's the view of the couch from the other side of the room.

I couldn't be any happier with the way this room has turned out so far.  I still have a few projects to finish:  I need to order legs for the tv stand (tutorial coming for that too), install wood flooring, and I want to do something about the fireplace.  I'm not in love with slate and really want to get rid of it. I'm open to any and all ideas on that one. Anyways. Thanks for reading!

xoxo Bre