The Livinig Room... Before, During, and After

As I said in my last post (like 2 months ago) we purchased a house in February and have been working hard to remodel it. The house was originally built in 1970 and let's just say, not much has changed from the original decorating. The house has been owned by one family since 1970 so it was in tip top shape, but really needed a lot of work and we decided it was a great idea to take on with a newborn on the way. Yeah you can call us crazy, cause we do! Luckily I have been blessed with a wonderful FIL who is a great handyman and has been doing most of the work for us.

So let me take you on a tour of where we have been and what has become of our living room.

Here is the living room in all of it's original glory. The carpet was a great yellow and all of the walls were white painted wood paneling.

The shelves and cabinents were built in and let's just say they were extremely well built! It took about 2 hours to get those down and the cabinents finally just had to be destroyed and taken out piece by piece.

And here is the fire place and the one window in the room plus another great picture of the carpet!
And construction has begun! The boys decided to pull down all of the old paneling and put up sheetrock to update the room. As you can see the paneling is down (it took quite a bit of time... they built things really well in 1970) and the carpet is up. There of course was linoleum under the carpet which just added to more demo!

And more demo! This is right before you can actually begin to see a change in the room!

The drywall went up with a little bit of work and as you can see all of the linoleum (that was classic 1970) has been pulled up. This was the first point in the project where I really felt that we were making progress. Unfortunately due to the pregnancy I was not able to do much to help which made it hard on me cause I would have loved to be able to assist, but I made one heck of a construction foreman!

And now as you can see they even put some paint on the walls! We went with a very light gray/beige to keep the room neutral and plus we could have never agreed on a color for the room. A green would have pulled too much green out of our sofa's and I would have hated that, a dark color would have made the room look small because of only having one window, and so on and so forth, so gray/beige it was!

I did let Keith have one accent wall which I have to admit looks really great! It really helps the fire place to stand out and adds a little color to that side of the room. I have to give it to the man, he is a way better decorator than me!

And here we are with a few more current pictures. You can't tell in this picture, but we have changed the color of the fire place from a yellow offwhite to the same color of the wall. The mantel is still being painted and once it is done we will be placing lots of pictures up there. We have new 20x20 tile on the floor (which is the one thing my FIL has not done in the house) and the boys added crown molding throughout.

Sorry the pictures are so dark, my camera was dead so they were taken with my Iphone. There is now furniture in the room and you can see the great crown molding. We still haven't gotten pictures on the walls as I have a few that are still being framed at Hobby Lobby. It will all come together soon enough!

And one last picture. I will put a few more up when there is a 100% completed project. We are still going to change out the back door by the fire place with a full glass one (hopefully within the next week or 2) to add more light into the room. We will also of course be adding things to the wall and a large rocker in the corner for those long nights with baby!