We finally finished our family room after four months of extensive remodeling (alliteration not intended)! It was a ton of work and we’re hoping the rest of the rooms will not be quite as time consuming. This is what it looked like before we moved in:
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| Yes, that is a jet black wall… |
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| …And a dark brown wall… |
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| …And a salmon colored wall…yep, 3 different colors |
Since I’m a southern California girl at heart and grew up 15 minutes from the ocean, we decided to go with a coastal theme for our home so I can trick myself into thinking I’m warm up here in freezing northern California 🙂 I’ll give you one point for detecting each aspect of the room we changed in this first picture of what it looks like now…kinda like the game “I spy.” There may or may not be a prize for the winner 😉
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| Sean installed all three of those wall lights himself (one on the left, two on the right), and connected them to the switch so we wouldn’t need lamps. We also painted the room blue, but that’s pretty obvious. |
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| See that awesome crown molding up top?? Sean did that too (with some help from our brother-in-law, Jake) |
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| Does the fireplace/mantle look different to you from the original photos? It should. We (tediously) painted it because we hated the red brick. We painted the brick white, and the mantle/mortar beige. A much more coastal look. |
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| First TV we’ve ever bought, got a great deal on Amazon |
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| First couch we’ve ever bought new – so thankful we didn’t need to spend hours and hours cleaning pet hair off it after we got it (like every time in the past)! It fits perfectly and maximizes seating in the room. |
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| Put up some bird decals to seal the deal on the beach theme |
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| We swapped out the ugly black curtain for some nice white blinds |
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| We just attended a parenting class at our church last week, and one of the speaker’s suggestions for keeping our kids God-focused was to put up visual reminders around our home of our faith. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to put Bible verses in each room! We chose this verse for our family room because both adults and children need constant reminding of this truth 🙂 |
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| We don’t have cable and when we (rarely) watch TV, we watch it via hulu on our computer. You can see all the electronics Sean hooked up on the second-to-bottom shelf. It was actually a lot of effort to get everything working correctly between the computer and TV (we ran into a lot of obstacles). |
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| We will eventually build a fire pit in our backyard so we decided not to use our family room fireplace for fires. Instead, we decorated it to go along with our beach theme. Driftwood, sand, shells, and candles to set the mood 🙂 Before you start envisioning toddlers throwing sand in each other’s eyes and all over the room, Sean installed plexiglass in front of the fireplace with a latch that locks. Good thing Grammie Christie and Auntie Allison gave Caleb a toy with six different latches on it (including the one Sean put on the fireplace), so he can practice unlocking it :/ |
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| Got two matching cream-colored bookshelves (also on amazon) |
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| A sand-looking rug to go with our theme, cottage style coffee table, keyboard/mouse to operate the TV, and of course, gotta have the board games for those crazy nights of competition with family/friends |
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| We really like decorating with photos because it makes our home feel cozy and personal to us. The left frame has our Christmas 2011 photo, the middle frame is the signature frame from our wedding with an engagement photo, and the right frame has a photo of Caleb from the wedding we just went to a couple weeks ago. |
Whew! That was a lot…the only two things in the room left untouched were the ceiling and flooring. It’s such a great feeling to post this on our blog because it solidifies that we are actually done (done!) with this room!! Yeah!!! Oh and here’s a link to Caleb’s completed nursery if you haven’t seen it. Now onto the guest room…
