Family Time {Family Room Makeover}

SO now for a post about my first finished living space in our new home...

This was definitely the room most in need of TOTAL makeover....as you can see from the 70s style paneling and dark, dreary woodwork and built-ins, this room was so outdated and dark. You would think it would be impossible for a room that is virtually all windows to be so dreary, but this room actually managed to succeed at impersonating a cave. Yuk. It was my original plan to start my DIY home redecorating here immediately upon moving in. However, since the move happened in the middle of a frigid Wisconsin January, it was unfortunately WAY too cold to start, since the first step would be to paint all of that woodwork and we would need the windows open to do it properly and air it all out. Thus, the room had to wait for the winter thaw to commence.

Here it is in all its glory, pre-makeover:

Did you check out that weird tiled celing?? What IS that? We even pulled down a tile to check out what was hidden below, er, I mean above....and it was actually this really incredible deep-beamed ceiling. Why on earth they covered it with those crazy, basement-esque tiles we will never know. I would have loved to tear it all down to expose the original ceiling. However, with all the tiles glued on with this nasty blue adhesive, it could have taken days or even weeks of blood, sweat and tears....so we opted to just drywall over the whole hot mess. Then we added a narrow crown molding to top it off. I won't even get into the story of buying the crown molding and wandering around the store for what felt like hours, trying to determine if I was purchasing the right thing.... and the days following that fiasco of Mark and I trying to figure out who was going to install it. That was one of those times that you wish you didn't have champagne taste with a beer budget. I mean...who needs crown-molding anyway??? Well, apparently my husband does NOT and I DO. That is what we learned. We also learned that talking about crown molding makes us test our marraige vows. :) Enter Steve L. Our hero. A great friend of ours, who also happens to be the guy that gutted the bathrooms at our duplex, installed the molding beautifully in just an hour or two. I didn't see it happen, but I was pretty DAMN. THRILLED. when I arrived home from work on a Monday and saw it all looking so glorious, up where the wall meets the ceiling. These are the things that excite me. Weird, I know.

So, The Plan: to go white with all the woodwork, built-ins and window and door trim and then do a slightly green tinted cream on the wood-paneled walls and ceiling to give the whole room a light, airy, beachy feel. I've got to look back at the exact names of the colors but I used Olympic paint from Lowes. They have a no-VOC line that is just as inexpensive as all the other Lowes and Home Depot brands. Gotta love that. Non-toxic and cheap. Wish I would have discovered that sooner. Anyway, it was "Delicate White" and "Featherstone" from their Rejuvenate collection. I have now sort of taken on that collection as the inspiration for my color palette for the whole house. We'll see if it pans out that way.

Oh, yeah. See those AWful, bright brass knobs on the built-ins? I took those off along with the hinges and sprayed them all with oil-rubbed bronze spray paint fron Krylon. I actually plan to do that with all the fixtures, knobs, handles and hinges in the whole house. I can't stand brass and its all over this place! The bathrooms and kitchen have been updated with brushed nickel, but the rest of the place is infested with cheesy brass. Shouldn't be too tough of a fix to spray it all and give it a quick-easy makeover, but it will be tedious.

So. The plan in three 'easy' steps:
Step One: Wait for spring and PAINT PAINT PAINT.
Step Two: Buy crown molding (or bed molding as this was called?) and install it (and if you and your husband don't know how, find someone who does!)
Step Three: Flowy, beachy curtains.
(After hunting high and low and lusting over these beauties from Ballard Designs, I settled on some much less pricey, limey green ones from Target. At only 7.99 a pop, purchasing 8 panels didn't make too big of a dent in my pocketbook and I was able to justify some of the other truly needed purchases for our newly and still only partially furnised home. Oh--and since my windows are WAY longer than the longest standard rods you can purchase without special ordering at a high premium, the curtain rods on the wide windows are actually two curtain rods hung right next to one another so it appears as though they are one continuous rod. Genious, huh? Not my idea. Saw it on the YHL blog. My fave.

So--Check out this AFTER shot. I HEART this room. Seriously. What a difference a little paint can make, huh?

Oh--I almost forgot to mention what a steal I got on the rug. Its the diamond jute rug from Pottery Barn. Unfortunately, I don't think its available anymore. I am pretty sure I got one of the last ones available. It was orginally over $300 for the 8x10 size. Anyway they had it on sale online for $149.99 but it was on back order for 3 months! I might be one of the most impatient people alive when it comes to stuff like this, so that would be WAY too long for me to wait....so I called the local store at Mayfair Mall to see if they had it in stock and they did, only it was $199. I asked if they would honor the online price, 'cause it never hurts to ask, and I got lucky and they did! Booya. A HUGE, awesome, natural fiber rug for 150 smackeroos.

As you can see, I also added some interest with a bold color on the back of the bookshelf (Olympic's Caribbean Splash)and some accent colors via the pillows, curtains and accessories. Oh...and I have a post coming up dedicated to that amAzing craigslisted (did you know that's an actual verb?) coffee table.

So...tell me. What do you think??

The Coop {Boy's Bedroom Makeover}

So this is how Cooper's room looked the week we moved in:

Not pretty! Check out that faux chair rail. Apparently the previous owners had some affection for chair rails and painters tape. I guess its fine if you don't mind it looking like your room is chopped in half...or if its 1992. But fortunately or unfortunately, I DO mind and its NOT 1992. So anyway, as I mentioned, we had to do the same thing in Lucia's room and it was a PITA to sand down flat. In this room we had navy blue dust everywhere. I guess when I think about it, its not an extremely labor-intensive job, but you definitely have to make sure to wear a mask and some old clothes. The good ol' handsander did the trick. It took about 30 minutes of sanding time along the top and bottom edge of the stripe, pressing pretty hard with the sander...and when the not-so-lovely blue stripe was finally all sanded down, we added a couple of coats of some Behr Almond Toast on the walls and some Behr gloss white on the woodwork (For some odd reason this was the only room in the house-minus the family room-that didn't have white woodwork)........ and VOILA!

Here is what Coop's new "Coop" looked like after our DIY makeover:

I am pretty happy with how it turned out! I picked up the awesome flatweave rug at IKEA. The bed was a housewarming gift from Mark's mom which we bought at JCP online. It even has a built-in trundle bed, which you obviously can't see from this angle.

I had some curtains just like these in my living room at the duplex and I really wanted to use them in this room but I only had two. They were the Nate Berkus line from Linens N Things, which apparently doesn't exist anymore, so I had to re-create them myself. I bought these plain brown panels from Target Boutique and added the ribbon detail on the top and bottom using iron on tape. Nifty, huh?

The Expedit shelf, which I LOVE, is IKEA also and comes in three different colors. We got the white one for the playroom also because I loved it so much in here. The baskets, which were only $5 each, were from Big LOTS of all places! The armoire we got at TJMaxx when we bought Cooper's crib for his nursery. It was a set and we only bought two pieces. I'm not really a fan of "sets" and had originally planned to paint this piece, but at the moment, I don't mind it in this wood tone. The Bamboo roman shades are from Home Depot. I hung them all as close together as possible for a seemless look. You could achieve the same by ordering custom sizes to go all the way across each set of windows but that would be much harder on the pocketbook then my bargain find!

I ordered the vintage train prints on this wall and above Cooper's bed on Fulcrum Gallery for under $10 and just framed them in frames from Target. The awesome train shelf above the bed is from Pottery Barn Kids. (I had a gift certificate!) and the Railroad Crossing Sign and vintage WI license plate were found online also.

So, that's the lowdown on Cooper's room. Its been done since February and I am just now finishing this post....and just as I was finishing up, I went upstairs to discover my two little bugs in bed reading together:

I posted this photo of the peanuts on facebook and a high school acquaintance told me the room looked like it was straight out of Pottery Barn! THANKS, Paul! What a compliment. Pottery Barn taste on a garage sale budget. I guess it works?