A couple of weeks ago, I shared the pictures from when we renovated our basement bathroom last year. So, to continue my Home Updates series, I thought I’d share our living room / formal dining room area.
To be clear, I made up the series because I like to look at other people’s homes and would like to have all our before/after pics in one place 😃…and I thought others may enjoy HGTV like updates as much as I do!
As I mentioned in my first Home Update post, I didn’t even want to look at our current home, but Travis dragged me there knowing I’d love the location, the schools, the yard….and the possibilities of what we could do with the house…to turn it into our home.
We moved in on a Friday, and Monday when I returned home from school, the room entrances had been widened. Only a couple weeks later, we had someone tackle the floors. They removed the carpet in the living/dining area to focus on the unfinished hardwood floors. (We had pulled back a piece of carpet one of the times we viewed the house, so we knew unfinished hardwood floors existed.) I will save the kitchen area for another post, but there was carpet in the entire kitchen/living space in that part of the house. There was only sub floor in the kitchen, so they laid unfinished hardwood floors in there, we chose a stain, slept in the basement for a week, and were pleased with such a big task being checked off our list after only living there a few weeks!
It’s funny to me how my style has changed. Our first home was decorated based on what we had. Our second house was a two story traditional, and I felt like I had to decorate in a more traditional sense with darker wood furniture and a darker color palette. With this house, I focused on lighter colors like cream and light gray and kind of went from there. I’d say my style now is “If Joanna Gaines stopped by, she’d be proud of me but I don’t want to live in the middle of Texas!” 😂
Nothing makes me realize how far we’ve come with our house (because I feel like it’s a never ending project) like before and after pics side by side. 🙂 I’m glad I saved the online listing pics!
Before:
During:
We couldn’t commit to knocking down the entire wall to the kitchen. It was such a big decision and it would have been more expensive, so we went with this cut out (knowing we could always take the full wall down later). We had shelves built under the cut out and that’s where the tv now sits. We like feeling connected to what’s going on in the kitchen while being in the living room.
The floors that were under the carpet! (Before we chose a stain)
After:
Note: my house looks bright, airy and most importantly, clean! But all I can see in the pic is that the rug is bunched up. 😬 Fun fact: Homer likes to run laps around the coffee table and mess up my rug!
Before:
After:
After we did the major renovations with the walls and floors, we (Travis) painted the living room, dining room, hallway, kitchen, and sun room. We chose a light gray color for the living room, sun room, and above the chair rail of the dining room. Then, we did a darker gray below the chair rail in the dining room. We Travis painted the kitchen “Pavilion Beige” by Sherwin Williams which is a nice neutral color. We had used it in our previous home, so we went with what we knew!
Besides the built ins, we added plantation shutters (dream come true for me!) in the living and dining room.
Before:
This is the formal dining room off of the living room, and it also leads into the kitchen.
After:
So, when we first moved in, we did use this space as a formal dining room. We had a hand me down dining table from my parents that we used in our previous home.
We ate in the kitchen 99% of the time because we had room for a table in there as well. After a couple of years, we had a farm house table built for the kitchen and rearranged the layout in there. Once the farm house table, that seats 8, was built, we turned the formal dining room into an office area that we desperately needed. This is a perfect spot for Travis to do work, for me to work on the blog, and for us to keep an eye on the kids when they are using the computer.
Thanks for following along on another Transformation Tuesday 🙂 I hope you are having a great week!
Jen
showmeandsweettea.com 