Living Room Transformation for $32.50!

You might remember that I found myself in a home funk on Friday.  I went home and the funk continued.  I walked through the home feeling unhappy with it.  Some sweet blog readers hit the nail on the head:

I AM NESTING. 

And apparently, it's a big time kind of nesting.

I didn't go through this with Liliana so I'm really weirded out by this feeling of panic and "I'm not prepared to bring another life in to the world in a few short months when my whole house feels out of place!"

I realize I'm being ENTIRELY overdramatic.  Really and truly, our house is gorgeous and most would be happy with it.  But apparently this nesting bug takes over you and makes you see CRAZY things.

Fortunately for me, instead of Evan saying "woman, you're crazy!" he was just patient.  PATIENT.  That is Evan's word.  He is the most patient husband you could imagine.

This weekend we started the "One Room at a Time Lacefield Home Renovation Project."  This will be done on OUR budget (which equals CHEAP) and in OUR time frame (which equals, probably over a couple years). 

I want to have a PLAN for each area instead of just jumping in to it.  It's easy to get sucked in to the renovating bug and not really thinking "what do I want out of this space."

We started on the living room ... and our living room, while no means done, is in the "in progress" stage and looks SO much better for just $30 dollars!

In July, after we had lived in the home for about 6 weeks, the livingroom looked like this:

BEFORE

Truly, this isn't a BEFORE picture like it says.  I had already made some changes by this point: those cushions were new and I absolutely love them (still do).  The rug is also new from Overstock (not my favorite purchase b/c it's not very soft and we like laying on the floor in our home). 

The wall color still got to me.  It looked like mud.  The ENTIRE house was this color when we moved in.  I wish I was kidding.  The ENTIRE thing.  Ugh.

So on Father's Day, Evan and I worked (sorry honey!).

We lightened up the walls.  You don't realize how dark your walls are until you take a picture like this.  The color we chose is "Oat Straw" from Behr.  It's a pretty safe neutral and goes really well with the red couches.

Once those walls were painted the living room stayed in that state until, oh, Friday night when my "nesting" commenced.

Before you knew it, I was up off the couches and moving them.  Moving the couches, moving the media console, moving the rug, etc.  Fortunately, the husband NEVER laughed at me or called me crazy.  He just helped me move things!  And we tried one thing, and then tried another until we got ...

SEMI-AFTER

Here is the living room today.  We moved the couches out and realized that we had things to tightly spaced in the room.  This freed up room for a chair, table, and lamp which looks like it's own reading nook.  LOVELY.

How did this all cost $30 you ask?

Well the paint was $30. 

The chair?  Do you see it in this picture?

I took the chair from our master bedroom, I took the lamp from our study, I took the table from the future baby nursery because it has been sitting in that room all by itself for over 6 months.  I took the little decor from shelves I had in the living room but took down once the reading nook area was made.  As for that gorgeous mirro above the fire place?  Our realtor got us a giftcard to a store called IO Metro and we bought it with that.  FREE mirror?  Yes please!

We are still in PROGRESS though...our next plans for the room?

When I zoom out you can see that the trim looks well ... unfinished.  That's another one of the kicks I got on this weekend.  Our trim needed to look like, well, a trim!  So off we went to Home Depot.  We spent $2.50 buying a sample and I started trying out how it would look.  The verdict is in and we LOVE it.

Slowly and surely, over time, we are going to pain this trim.  Sure it will take time since I'm pregnant and Evan doesn't like the idea of my standing on a ladder.  And since Evan's always working, the two of us don't exactly have time on our hands.  But it will get done.

We also plan on putting up curtains to the side of the big window.  They'll be light to help brighten the room even more.  I don't want to cover the windows AT ALL because the best part of our house is the view in to our backyard (tons of TALL and GORGEOUS trees).  We would still like to do something on the fireplace wall, but we're not too sure where to move with that just yet.  For now, our plan for this room is aobut 33% achieved, and 75% planned.  But, I'm happy with that. 

This nesting pregnant Momma is more than happy with that. For $32.50, I think we're doing pretty darn good!

Linking to:

http://evolutionofstyleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Room%20Evolutions