Back to the Living Room: Some pre-blog history

The first room I'm tackling this year is my living room. When we bought our home 1 1/2 years ago this is what the room looked like:

My husband was, bizarrely enough, a fan of all the house's orangey knotty pine (it. was. everywhere.) but I didn't share his passion. I knew it had to go, and it had to go fast.

There are still several touches of this wood throughout the house, but my husband was a good enough sport to let me repaint the kitchen cabinets (which were, of course, the same color) and sort this room out a little bit before we moved.

The woodstove sat in the center of the room and made it really difficult to move any furniture in the room into any attractive arrangement, so it needed to go. I'm not really a woodstove kind of gal anyway. Give me a nice gas fireplace that turns on with the flick of switch over a 1 million pound cast iron thing any day.

Also on the list of things that had to go were the cabinets on either side of the stove and the paneling on that wall, since it was only installed on the top half, above the cabinets. I could have left the paneling on the other walls and painted it white, but since I was already rippin' the room up anyway... might as well finish the job, right?

So we had a demo party...

Everyone pitched in, and a (moderately) good time was had by all. When we went to pull the tongue-in-groove paneling from one wall though, we got a surprise:

More paneling!

Ohh, good times. If there's one thing I've figured out it's that nothing is ever as simple as you think it's going to be when you start a project.

My brother in law hung new drywall for us and we had the walls taped and textured.

 

(Am I seeing things or does it kind of look like a face?)

I quickly picked a paint color (totally rushed it, that's why I'm redoing it soon!), my husband and brother in law patched the subfloor and we had carpet installed.

A few months later, my brother in law built us some fabulous shelves and we paid to have them primed and painted (we got a deal and I had zero desire to paint shelves -- I painted the master closet in our last house and it was awful. All those shelves! And corners! Oh, the horror!)

Then after so much progress, the project ground to a halt. My windows and doors have sat untrimmed for over a year, I still don't have baseboard or doors on the two center cabinets along the bottom of the built-ins where we house the electronics, and like I mentioned I am not the biggest fan of this paint color.

Not anymore though, friends -- I've turned over a new, project-finishing leaf and this room will get done(ish) soon. I said "bye bye" to my front room board and batten plans for the moment and instead I used my Christmas gift card to buy all sorts of goodies to help finish this room, before I start (yet another) project.

Tomorrow you get to help me pick a paint color! Aren't y'all the luckiest??