Checking the Box on the Family Room

We finally finished our family room! There’s no story behind this space. It was yellow when we moved in. We painted it blue three months later and bought a couch, and then did practically nothing. The basement is finished, so we’ve been using that as our family room. Over Thanksgiving break, we decided enough was enough, so we knocked out the rest of the work. Thankfully, it wasn’t much.

This is the picture of the room from the realtor when we were looking at this house. The wall color is nice – the same as what’s in the kitchen and we kept it there – but it was a lot of yellow.

We snapped only two photos when the room was empty… 

and clearly didn’t do a great job with them.

After we painted and bought the couch, I focused on getting that end of the room presentable. There’s nothing fancy in this picture. The couch, rug, lamp, and little stepstool/table on the left are from Ikea. The end table, photo frame, yellow art, and pillows hail from Target. The frames on the wall (and the scrapbook paper in them) are from Michael’s, as are the flowers and vase. The moon on the left wall is from Crate+Barrel, and the basket holding blankets and pillows is from Bed Bath & Beyond.

The other end of the room is very plain; I don’t want a bunch of knickknacks taking up space. The dresser is Ikea, and that was actually the only thing we had to buy. The chair was my grandparents, we already had Christmas decorations and the tray table, and my dad gifted us with the plant a few weeks ago.

Just for fun – a panoramic shot. You can actually see part of our frame wall in this one : )

I really enjoy seeing our plans for these different rooms coming together. We’re not in a position to take on anything major right now, like the bathroom I dream of remodeling or the laundry room I envision us creating. But working from home this week was much more enjoyable is such a finished space. 

We Have a Room Dedicated to Dining

That's right; you read it here first. We have a room specifically for dining. And because we inherited a full suite of furniture from my dad's house, it was the easiest room to finish next.

So this is the room we had to work with, viewed from the corner near the steps upstairs. It's a great size with beautiful parquet floors, lovely windows, and a very dated but useable chandelier.

Here's a better view from over near the windows. The colors were nice enough in theory, but not our taste. And the colors showed every scuff on the walls.

We painted the top half of the walls a deep red, and after three coats, managed to cover the sea green with a light ivory. Then my awesome father came over to teach TJ and me how to use the miter saw. (Ok, TJ learned. I took photos.)

With the miter saw, we made our chair rail. 

And by "we" I obviously mean those two.

And here's the end result for the walls.

And here's the total end result! All the furniture is, again, courtesy of my father who saw no need for a formal dining room. (In truth, I think we only used it three times when my mom was alive.) The bowl on the table is from Target, and the orbs inside it are from Target and Ikea. The drapes are also from Target, but my grandmother made the valances.

Here's another view from the steps upstairs/entrance to the kitchen. The pictures on the wall are also from my parents house.

And finally, this view. The closed door hides the steps and their dirty green carpet. (We'll get to that eventually!) But this view is special to me. I played the piano as a child, and my mom always told me I'd want this piano in my home someday. She was right. And the picture above it was painted by my dad in 1980. He's not only incredibly handy around the house, but a fantastic artist too.

Here's a better view of the art, and the knicknacks on top of the piano. The candle on the left is Febreze, as is the air freshener inside the backless shadowbox. The brown mosaic candleholder is from Michael's. The topiary is from Target.

Dinner is much more enjoyable in a completed room. Surrounded by such rich colors, I can almost forget that the rest of the house is still scattered with boxes from our move nine months ago!

Departure Posting – House Update

One of my great “salvations” from dwelling on sad things in my life is decorating our new-to-us home. We bought the place right before Christmas. It had been empty for about a year, so there was a LOT of work to do before we could move in. Finally, at the end of January, and with the help of some great friends and family, we boxed up our life again and started living there. We’ve been nomadic for a few years – we never went more than a few miles from place to place, but managed to move quite a few times. In fact, as I’m counting now, I moved ten times in eight years. Wow.

Anyway, I really enjoy the planning process and seeing a room or space transform. I’m a fairly creative person, and though my day job requires some creativity in pieces I’m writing, working for a corporation of course comes with some constraints. (I’m sure the good people of this company have no interest in my short stories or memoirs.) Working on our home allows me to flex the small creative muscles I have. Unfortunately, this also requires us to do some flexing of the wallet… and thus, the decorating process runs slowly as we begin to save for things like children and new water heaters.

In our previous, more temporary homes, I put an emphasis on making the “public” spaces look finished, and therefore never spent much time working on our bedroom. Our bedroom “set” was a mixture of pieces from our childhood rooms and college apartments. So when we bought this house, we decided that was the first place we should invest in. It’s on the first floor of the house, and if the door is open, the room is visible from the family room, hallway and dining room, so it seemed worthy to invest in making it nice.

Here’s what we had to work with in the beginning:

This isn't our room at all; this is the photo that was on the realtor's listing of the house so the furnishings belong to the previous owner.

Also, it's hard to tell here, but the walls are a sickly green.

We were left with those window shades,

and a random mirror that was glued to the wall.

Luckily, the floors are gorgeous!

They're in mint condition throughout the entire first floor.

Our to-do list included painting, removing previous window treatments, removing the mirror glued to the wall and a shelf that was above their old bed, and a seriously thorough scrubbing. However, this isn’t YoungHouseLove.com, so we don’t have photos of us doing those things. We don’t look happy when we paint and we don’t look cute when we clean. But we do take after photos.

We painted the walls a soft lilac color to play off the purples in our bedding.

We also invested in some great ceiling-to-floor curtains from Crate & Barrel.

They have a beautiful side-to-side grey/khaki/ivory ombre effect.

I was hesitant to go with an entire wall of curtains but we love it!

The bed is wrinkled and it bothers me, but everything had just come back from the dry cleaners and was still creased. The bedding is from Bed Bath & Beyond and the flower prints are from Ikea.

There's not a lot to see in this photo but our dog, Lulu :)

The curtains are from Target and they're a plum/lavender dip-dye.

All the furniture in the room is from Furniture Fair, except the lingerie chest in the last photo, which is from JC Penney.

I love our dresser, even with TJ's baseball cap sitting in the basket here :)

Also, the vase on the left belonged to my mother.

I'm trying to weave a small piece of her into each room.