I hope that this shows you how dark and dingy our living room was before but I promise the finished product is WAY better. We decided to redo our living room recently and dang, am I SOOO glad!! When we bought our house, that was one of the major to dos that had to be done to make me feel comfortable living in our home. We felt a little pressured to start because we had found a grant that allowed us to put in a gas fireplace instead of our wood burning one that we never used because it was wood burning. I mean who wants to chop all that wood, have your house smell like smoke and do all of that work to maintain it? Not us. After designing it and figuring out what we wanted the finished product to look like we got started demoing.
We started with the fireplace because we knew that we were going to have a gas fireplace put in. We took the paint off even though we were just going to paint it white again because the paint before had drips everywhere. Then we pulled off the black tile that was there before and got the floor as level as possible. We hired an electrician to put an outlet into the back of our fireplace which resulted in us taking the mantel off the top, which I was fine with because I wanted to replace it anyway.
After we purchased the tiles to put the fireplace back together, we started to clean up and pull the carpet. This carpet was NASTY!! There was animal stains all over and an outline of where the furniture was. It was gross so I'll spare you the pictures. One of the questions that we get asked a lot when people notice that we have hardwoods is, "why don't you just refinish the floor?" My answer is because of the pet stains, it ruined the floors. Sections were rotted away and we would have had to replace sections of the floor. There was so much that we would have had to replace, that it would no longer be cost effective. So, we just put some chemical on it to protect it from further damage and to get rid of the smell.
Brady tiled our fireplace. We only did the front portion because with the fireplace insert put in, you weren't going to be able to see the insides. This helped us to cut cost a little bit. After we got the fireplace done, we were ready to have our fireplace inserted. Once that was done, we were on to laying down our floor. We decided to go with LVT flooring because we knew that we were going to have Ash-the-dog inside and we wanted something that was low maintenance but looked good.
The flooring was super easy to insert. It had a tongue and groove insert so you just slid the pieces together. Us installing the floor ourselves also helped us save some money. It might have taken longer than paying someone to do it, but it was worth it.
I painted the walls the same color that I did in the bedroom. I plan on using this color throughout our whole house. It is a good neutral color that I feel fits with almost anything. Adding the can lights made a huge difference in brightening up the room.
From the pictures and this post it looks like things went pretty quickly. In reality, this project took MONTHS! I didn't think that we were ever going to finish. It felt like we stayed at this point for a long time. What took so long was all of the finishing touches that we wanted to do before we moved in our furniture. We replaced our trim which took some time because we painted it before we put it on to make touching it up cleaner and easier. We added the can lights while it was at this point too. It felt like we weren't making any progress because all of the big changes were done. Eventually, we made more progress.
Before we knew it we were adding in all the goods! We sold most of our old furniture and bought some new furniture that we will keep for years to come. Deciding on the furniture was easy for me because I knew what I wanted but I had to take into account what Brady wanted.
We decided on the furniture pieces and have been pretty particular about what we put in our living room because each piece is what shows others who we are. We try to make each room fit our personality and style and this room screams us.
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