Everyday A New-day: Living Room Worth Living In…

Our entire house was tan when we moved in. EVERYTHING: baseboards, walls, ceilings, doors and door frames. It really stunted my creativity for a while. I couldn’t picture what i wanted to do with this space. Our very first project moving into the house was installing a doggy door. Being new to living out in the country I sure as heck didn’t want to wake up to an angry possum having crawled through our doggy door so we got an electric one. The dogs have receivers on their collars that communicate with a sensor on the door so only they can open and close it. This doggy door sounded perfect was bulky, white, and mounted on the wall with ugly decals a blaring. Well my handy hubby figured out a way to mount it in the wall drywalled it in so that only the door and the actual key pad would show, and finished it off nicely with some molding.

not too shabby eh?! It looks like this from outside the house….

Months went by though, and nothing else happened…..I was stuck, and it just didn’t feel like home yet. One day I just decided I had to start somewhere. The kitchen was bugging me because it had no backsplash, and I hated trying to scrub all the kitchen spatter off of the satin finish walls! So we chose a backsplash tile!

We needed a wall color that would really go well with the different earthy toned tiles, but also something that would bring some life into the area. So I chose an orange color I like and it went on one of our our living room walls which then continues into the dining room, and kitchen area since they are all connected are all connected.

I also painted all the trim in the main part of the house dark brown. All of our furniture is dark brown stained wood. From our couches, to our dining set, master bedroom set, nursery furniture, even our baby grand piano! I then also painted the crown molding on the kitchen cabinetry this same color to break up all the lighter colored wood in there.

Since Talynn was crawling around the same time we first moved in we had installed gates at the top of the stairs and at the entrance in the kitchen. Who wants to be tripping over dogs and kids while their workin in the kitchen?

During this time we also bought and installed a dishwasher. Who doesn’t have a dishwasher installed in a house being built in 2010? Anywho, we installed a dishwasher, and had to run the water and electric over to it, and decided to put some wainscoting on the outside of the cabinets facing the dining room because it was currently the ugly paneling they come with , and i painted this the same dark brown as all the trim.

All the light and outlet switches were white so we changed those out for some bronze finish ones in the kitchen, and regular brown in the remaining living area.

We also replaced the awful ailing kitchen faucet with a bronze finished one (i want a bronze hammered sink eventually to go with it).

The door to the laundry room in the kitchen and the door to the pantry were still the tan color that the rest of the house was, and looked kind of weird next to the dark brown trim, orange walls and then the medium colored kitchen cabinets so i did layers of color and mix colors to try and mimic the color of the cabinets onto the doors, and it’s much more pleasing to eyes-

This picture kind of shows how close I was able to get the door and cabinet colors.

Here is the BEFORE picture. It’s actually from when the previous owners lived in it,i couldn’t find the before pictures i took of the kitchen….

and AFTER

The kitchen window eventually got a pretty cool bamboo blind.

Now we needed some of those finishing decor touches in the living area because so far i had nothing on the walls! Some of the accent pillows we already had some light blue’ish colors on them so this became another main color i wanted to use in the decor. I also redid some of the couch pillows with an orange fabric to tie in the wall colors.

I know i say it all the time I hate clutter, and I love organization, and well kids toys are such an eye sore for me and it makes me feel anxious seeing them all over the place so I got baskets that fit perfectly under our couch. This is where the toys go. Each basket has a theme: stuffed animals, cars, puzzles, blocks, tools, misc., etc. Another thing I hate is wasted space. There is all this wasted space under the couches so why not use it!

We have 6 total baskets three under the large portion of the L section and 1 under the single seater part, and then 2 more under the love seat….this here is obviously the vehicle basket. This lovely basket is brim full of cars, trains, tractors, and planes!

The couches all have covers on them because someone thought it would be brilliant to buy white couches with children and dogs (jeff!) and well between rainy seasons and a muddy backyard, and a dog that goes into heat twice a year, and then also bleeds after her litters of puppies I decided to make these couch covers, and they have been a God send. They also add some spunk to the room with the touch of polka dot pattern.

Below you see couch minus the cover….yup super white, for now anyways!

I’ve seen ideas of posting family attributes in your home. Things to aspire to. So I made this Wall in our home, and was able to pull in all our colors! I just used a bunch of scrap wood we had from other projects painted them in all my various colors, and then I hand painted each word on them. This would have been easier, and faster if i had done vinyl, but i’m poor and cheap…..so i did it the hard way!

A HARRIS IS….

other random touches……

(i’ve actually already made some adjustments to this wall and have a few other things in mind…..so i’ll have to post the finished product later on)

I made this H from some bamboo pieces that we cut off the bamboo curtain in the kitchen. It was way too long so we shortened it. I cut out the H shape in a piece of carboard then hot glued piece of bamboo which i cut to size….

This is obviously a log slice that i used a wood burner to burn an h onto.

This is a scrap of beadboard that i sprayed painted and distressed. I cut a scare of burlap, made a carboard H stencil and then spray painted onto the burlap with a brownish/bronzish paint. Then mounted the burlap onto the beadboard.

The starburst mirror was actually a little circular mirror with flower petals around the edge. (i found it at the DI for less than a dollar) I spray painted it cream, and then used more pieces from the bamboo curtain cut at various length spray painted the same cream color of course. Hot glued them around the edge of the mirror. WAH LAH!

Windows Windows Windows. All the windows had atrocious blinds….that just beg for kids and dogs to destroy. Plus the blinds in the bigger windows were the vertical blinds which are just hideous, noisy, and impossible to hide. So we purchased some dark faux wood blinds for the dining room and living room, and some color appropriate curtains to accompany them.