This is my very first post about our house. It is 12:30 in the morning, I’m watching Project Runway All-Stars on TIVO, and I am hopped up on a decaf (yes decaf) Americano I had from Starbucks at 11:50 this morning. Why do I drink coffee? It only makes me jittery and feel like I’m on speed. I could barely work or drive. I drink it because I just love the taste. Plain and simple.

This little feature is all about our family room.  I don’t like calling it that, but we have a “Formal” living room, so people started getting annoyed that they didn’t know which living room I was talking about.

It started as above.  With a whole lotta hunter green.

We hired a painter, who started on January 17th. It is now March 15th, and we have trim in the kitchen, the dining room, and trim and wall paint in the living room, sun room, and family room. We painted the kitchen and dining room walls (badly), so we only needed finishing in those rooms. All the trim in the house is a strange off white/beige that feels as those it was baked on. It requires a base coat of this stuff called Gripper, which stinks. The product doesn’t stink, it’s awesome.  The fact that we have to use it stinks.  It adds yet another step, and more time. The trim and some walls were painted with oil-based paint, so nothing just goes on top of it. I will write soon about my daughter Lyla’s nightmare bedroom make-over which involves lots of do-overs with the paint. We always joke that you can’t touch anything in there or it will peal off.

The before pictures were the actual photos on the listing for the house. As you can see, the previous owners had very traditional style, and they favored dark colors. This is the case throughout the house. Unfortunately, it did not suit our tastes, and every single room and ceiling, and quite bit of trim in every square foot of the 3,373 sq ft house needed/needs to be painted to get closer to our aesthetic. That’s a lot of paint and labor. A true labor of love.

We waited four months to start painting, and it killed me to wait. However, after actually buying the house, we had to save some cashola to pay for a painter. It’s just too much to do ourselves. We painted the dining room twice before settling on a Charcoal from the Flint Paint Collection at Restoration Hardware. I love the dining room now, but our first, lighter gray read too blue and I hated it. Then we tried a touch of gray color but it read too white. Then we went back and forth on whether to paint the trim white or not. More on all of that later.

For the family room, other than paint, my main peeve was the ceiling. It seemed like maybe it was an 80′s builders add-on area. It extends beyond the house shape a bit, and has an awkward vaulted ceiling like a parallelogram. I knew I wanted to add beams to trick the eye a bit. This is what was conquered first. I used the photo inset as inspiration, and told our painter/handyman/dog sitter David what I wanted. With the help of a friend of his who is an electrician and has done construction, they went to it. 18 hours later, we had painted beams inset into the slopes of the ceiling. We hung a temporary light fixture just to position something in there, and replace the heavy light/fan that resembled a old western saloon fixture.

The big window was also troublesome to me. I wanted to originally do a drapery rod high with drapes that fell over the crescent shape, so you didn’t know it was crescent shaped up top. I became paralyzed with fabric options, and couldn’t commit for fear I would hate them later, so the window is staying uncovered for now. I still wanted a way to draw attention away from it’s scale and shape. My first thought was that painted white trim would do it but everyone convinced me/us to keep the trim dark until we could see the light gray walls with it.

Everyone also told me to keep the brick fireplace as is, and we painted it white in November and I love the result. Thanks to my mother-in-law’s boyfriend John who painted it for us!

We painted the first coat on the walls, and David asked what I thought about the trim. I immediately wasn’t digging it. I just had to convince Mr. T. of it! He reluctantly agreed, but feared the white might be too much. It looked incredible in the other rooms, and I knew it would look equally amazing in the family room.

So, before the second coat went up, we decided to switch gears and paint the trim white. So, Gripper on the trim, trim paint, trim paint coat #2, then second coat of gray paint on walls, then second coat of ceiling white which is a real PITA to cover. Our kitchen (whose ceiling was green) took three coats.

The result was grand. I love it. Granted, the room is barely set-up for anything yet, and what is there is starting to blend in a little too much. I have to pump up the color factor in there a tinge, add some art, get some cool pieces to mix in. In these pics it’s obviously missing half of our stuff. You like how I also take pics with our laundry in there, my daughter lounging, and misc. crap laying around? That’s every day. Sorry.

Ohhh, and the wet bar is gone. That was the first order of business. It, its mirror, and sink all went bye bye. David needs to stain the hard wood to match the rest of the floor where it once existed, and we have to decide what we are doing in that corner. Right now it just looks like a step wall. So odd. Maybe a closet where we can hide toys, a wine fridge, and our million drink glasses?

A few weeks later…Still need light fixture to replace kitchen task lamp seen here, a console table behind off-white chairs, a new chair to replace brown one, a new lamp that doesn’t look like it belong in Sherlock Holmes office, and perhaps matching lamps on end tables around sofa. We also desperately need somewhere to house our Tivo/cable/phone mess. Right now we have a wicker table holding them and all the wires, it’s so tacky. I hate it.