Project: Living Room Fast Forward

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I figured since the last post focused on the dining room, that I should do a 180 and focus on the other half of our large front room area - the living room!  I do have a proper "before" shot for this one. Note the window boxes - also made from paneling! This guy LOVED paneling!

Note the high-traffic area from the previous owners?

One of the projects that I didn't mention in the last post was the floor.  When we moved in, the entire house was carpeted. Actually, every room (besides the kitchen and bathroom) was carpeted in the same carpet.
You can see some of the pictures featuring the beige-pinky carpet from the home inspection here.

During the home inspection I had some foresight to peel up a corner of the living room carpet and discover some awesome hardwood floor underneath!

From the original walkthrough with our real estate agent.

So right after we pulled the paneling down in the dining room, we pulled up the carpet in the front room! 

And then we pulled that paneling off the opposite wall.  We think it was their attempt to balance the room - cover the dining room with dark wood paneling and then throw it on another random wall while we're at it! Yeesh.

The room was so much brighter already!

Once all of the paneling was down and the carpet was up (in the whole house thanks to a work weekend from my mom and my sister - which deserves it's own post entirely), AND since there was no furniture in the house yet, we took the opportunity to have the floors refinished!  But before I show the after shots, I have to explain the extra project that the flooring company took on. When we pulled the carpet up, we discovered an area where there obviously used to be a wall.  Apparently where the living room is now, used to be a bedroom! When they tore that wall down to open the front room up, they just threw some short flooring pieces into the gap in the floor, and then just covered it with carpet.  That didn't really work with the hardwood floor look we were looking for! Unfortunately, once again, I didn't take a very good "before" shot - so I've just got the zoomed in version in the next picture.

So, when we hired the flooring company, we made sure it was a company that could help us fix the eyesore that was this patchwork flooring area!  The solution? A border around the entire living room with a different wood!

Feel free to "ooh and ahh" with me.

More before and after shots of the floor. 

Purdy, right?

 Ok. So with the floors done, it was time to tackle the walls.  You may be wondering what those dark lines on the wall are, right?  Those line up exactly with the seams of the paneling that had been up, so we're fairly sure that he had to paint the wall darker along those lines to conceal the seams of the paneling.  Not as purdy as the floor.

We discovered the same problem with peeling paint on this wall as we did in the dining room, so first we had to scrape off as much of it as we could.  Then we set about doing the drywall mud/sanding/sneezing/more drywall mud routine.  I don't have any pictures of that part. Why? Because it's boring. And because I didn't want to get drywall dust on my camera.

After we finished with the drywall patching, we had to decide what color to paint the room.  Turns out we're really noncommittal when it comes to paint color. Here we are literally. Watching. Paint. Dry.

"It seems a little too green-blue to me - do you agree? I think we want more
of a green-grey. Let's go back to Home Depot."

We finally picked a color (after putting a lot more paint swatches on the wall) - Behr's Wasabi Powder. Painting this room took Fore.Ev.Er.  We started late in the morning on a Saturday and finished late in the evening after putting two coats on.

Making progress! 

Shot from the next morning after it dried a bit more.

Sadly, we discovered that the far wall still basically sucked. You could still see the edges of the peeled paint underneath. Maybe because we were lazy and didn't do a coat of primer underneath? Regardless - it sucked. And we weren't happy with that wall at all - but we did love the rest of it!

Solution? Bookshelves (which we were planning on anyway - it was just a coincidence that we really, really needed to cover up that wall!)!  We went to Ikea and bought two bookshelves and hauled them home in our Saturn Ion. I wish I had a picture of me hugging the steering wheel trying to operate the pedals because I was so squashed to try to make room for them in the back. J couldn't even attempt to drive it because the drivers seat was so cramped. We laughed the whole way home! 

To personalize the bookshelves we painted the back of them a dark green to contract with the lighter green walls and the white of the bookshelves.

We're fans of side-by-side comparisons.

A shot of the shelves from my phone.

Yes we're watching Jeopardy. We're nerds - I'll admit it.

Another important addition to the room is Stella's bench.  Our dog loves to look out the window. Seriously - she lives for it.  When J still lived in Wisconsin, she would spend her entire day staring out the window watching people walk by.  Unfortunately, our house doesn't have any windows at the right height for her to look out of without putting her front paws up on the windowsill.  So, being the crazy/weird dog-lovers that we area, we thought a big ottoman would allow her to partake in her favorite pastime while we were away at work/school!

Success! (We've since turned it sideways since she apparently couldn't
figure out how to turn herself sideways.)

She also likes to hang out on it just to catch a couple rays.

This is another work-in-progress room. I put up curtains (that I made - thanks to Sheri on YoungHouseLove.com!) last weekend and we added an actual arm chair so we don't have to keep pulling a dining room chair into the room when there are more than 3 people here. Yay!