Family Room - In Progress

Ah...the family room. Where else do you spend most of your time? This room is really coming together and looking absolutely AMAZING!!! Ray has done an exceptional job at transforming this room from blah to WOW! Check out some of the following pictures!

Here's what this room looked like when we moved in. The color was this ugly peachy/pinky browny tan color. Just yuck.

So, we started to paint it. I choose a very neutral tan for now. Maybe later we'll paint things different, but this color is painted in all rooms that flow into one another on the main floor. It's 'Light Rafia' from Valspar (Lowe's paint).

Here's the room all painted. The ceilings we painted white. We lived with the room like this for a couple of months (we painted before we moved in).

But really...this room was plain and had no storage. What to do, what to do...

So Ray built some shelves! Yep! They are fantastic. The 'arch' follows the same one that's over the fire place. He just made a template and cut out the wood to match. We decided to paint the shelves black to go along with some furniture we purchased for the dining area.

You may have noticed the tile gone in the picture about. Yep - couldn't stand the pinky, peachy ugly tiles. So...down the tiles came.

And here's what we're putting up in place. Some small 1" x 1" tiles around the fire place itself. They're made out of slate.

And then to add even more WOW factor, we're decided to go with large slate tiles (12" x 12") around the entire thing! Plus Ray added a wood mantle!

And talk about a WOW factor! Doesn't this look AMAZING! Really, the pictures don't do it any justice.

Here's an up close picture. The 2"x 2" squares that you see mixed with the 1" x 1" are made of glass. They have a cool 'foil' behind them and it really helps them pop!

We'll be painting the ugly gold/brass to a matte black to match the rest of the fire place. We haven't done any 'decorating' yet in this room, either, but I can't wait. I absolutely LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this room and how it's looking! Eventually we'll get a flat screen TV to go above the mantle, but they need to come down in price a bit more.

Can't wait to add the same slate to the back-splash in the kitchen (but that's a bit down the road).

Check back again this week - for when we visit my other favorite place of the house - the SCRAPROOM! :)

Small Bath / Laundry Room Before & After - so far :)

Hi Everybody,

Sorry it's been so long. I've been slacking. Anyway, here's a quick update for you on what we've done to our small hall bath/laundry room on the mail floor.

When we started out, this room was completely white. We chose a very light blue color to paint the walls and are going with brushed silver and glass accents.

Here's a 'kinda' before picture - but after we painted.

You can see that there was just a plain opening/wall there separating the bathroom area from the laundry area. It really did not help to define the space.

So, since there was no definition, Ray came up with the plan to divide it a bit more by putting an 'arch' way between the sides of the room - kinda making each become it's own space.

And viola! It's pretty when painted like the rest of the walls. It really does look amazing! The first is a view looking into the laundry side.

Here's the view looking out of the laundry side into the bathroom, and then the hall area.

And here's what we did with the lights...I only have pics of the bathroom side. We started out with your standard ugly bathroom lighting.

And then we took that out and added some great light blue, dark blue, and a bit of green - pendant lights (2). The holes in the ceiling bring us to a 'funny' story. Ray couldn't fit his hand thru the hole on the wall to reach the wires. So I tried, but couldn't pull any of the wiring thru (it was stuck on something). So, we had to cut another hole to get what we needed pulled thru.

And once patched and painted - you'd never know we did anything :)

On the laundry side, Ray installed some recessed stainless steal lights. They look great. I'll update this post when I can find the pictures of that.

And that's the bathroom/laundry room so far. We have done no decorating just yet. But as you can see from the pic above, Ray did put it a great little glass shelf for me to add something to, and a new towel holder.

Yay!