Meet Our New Living Room

Thank you so much for all the very kind words you offered yesterday about our kitchen reveal! You made us smile! :)

Today I want to introduce you to our new living room! Our living room at our old house was pretty small. It was long and narrow, which made it delightfully cozy, but somewhat of a nightmare for large furniture. That's why we ended up getting Mo {our couch}: he made it possible to add seating without adding a whole new piece.

I think we about doubled our space with our new living room, and while our original plan had been to include our dining room table in this space, we nixed that idea to make it a little bit more open and comfortable. We learned, though, on Mother's Day that by moving just one chair, we have plenty of room to add long tables and mostly-comfortably seat a dozen or more people.

Here was the living room as a blank canvas on our first day:

We both adored the vaulted ceilings, the abundant natural light, and all the space. We noticed those things right away when we toured the home! Our old living room only had one window and it wasn't even a true "picture window" so the whole natural light thing didn't happen there. I've been SO HAPPY with picture taking in this house because of the lighting!

The house has pretty new carpet and while it is really light {almost white, actually} and not quite what we were used to at our old place, it wasn't worth it to us to replace it because it's still in really good shape and it's neutral. All the walls were tan again, which I liked, but I needed a little contrast somewhere. And so we got busy overhauling this room.

In the second picture above, you see "the wall." The one that came down to open up the space to the kitchen. And no. We don't normally have a tripod sitting in the hallway. HA!

Here are some pictures from the room in progress:

You might have to enlarge the picture to see it, but there's a big #DEMODAY written on that wall. Oh, I love my Chip Gaines Junior!

Ten million points to the guys for tripod-ing all those shots since I wasn't there to document.

 We decided to keep the two vaulted walls the same tan color they were when we moved in, but we painted the little wall the same milk chocolate that we had painted the bathrooms at our old house. It gave some depth to the room without making it too dark.

It was kind of a mess in there at that time. Living room/workshop.

For the other wall, we did the stone feature I'd found on Pinterest. It's called AirStone, and it's a faux stone that you adhere to the wall. It's not heavy, so it doesn't weigh down the wall. It doesn't require grout. It does require a lot of patience. {Here is the post on how that process worked.} Ryan worked for over a week on this wall and it turned out STUNNING.

 This wall took so much work, but the end results were AMAZING.

I present:

And again, if you need side by side comparisons, here you go. Click to enlarge.

I'm even amazed by the transformation in the second one, and I live here!

So a recap of what we did...We left the carpeting alone and the paint on the two vaulted ceilings stayed. We painted one wall Milk Chocolate {Valspar, Lowe's} and put up new curtains. The curtains at the small window actually came from the living room window at our old house. The curtain on the other window, we purchased from Amazon to cover up the vertical blinds. {Vertical blinds bug me, but they're up and we paid for them with the house, so I just cover them and move on.} We tore down half the wall that led into the kitchen and put up the AirStone treatement, along with a counter that passes through to the kitchen. We moved in the furniture we already had - nothing new - and called it done!

We adore our living room. Seriously adore it. We also adore having ALL our living room furniture in one place. We could not do that at our old house. Big, comfy couches for people to hang out and kids to play when they come over. Lots of space for working out and for throwing in a couple of tables to feed the masses. Easy conversation between the two rooms and much, much light.

{Funny story: the night the wall came down, the former owners came over to drop off some things they meant to leave behind. They walked in, stared at the opening, and said, "We never thought of that." LOL!! I think they liked it!}

We put the clock on the stone wall and now we call that our clock tower. LOL! It feels very regal.

That wonderful, heavy counter top. It has worked so well, both in our everyday life and in what we've observed so far of our entertaining life. We love it.

We bought this wall saying a long time ago and have always wanted to hang it up, but the walls in our old house were textured and couldn't support vinyl wall letters. So this was our first chance to use it and we love it! Our little family of two. :)

Ahhhh, our comfy seating area. We seriously love it. Have I mentioned that?

So that's a tour of our living room! More rooms to come!