Living room progress

I thought I'd give an update on the living room. We still have to get the art up, but the rest is done. Let's not forget what it looked like before.

Here are a few iPhone pics, so excuse the quality. Notice our new Karlstad couch from Ikea. We moved some bookshelves from the spare room to use as the TV stand. We also rearranged the books by color for impact. We saw that recently on Home by Novogratz on HGTV.

And here's before again....

Stay tuned for a full update once we have some art up.

The rooms, they are a-changin'

We finally decided to start the long process of painting the wood paneling on the walls in the living and dining rooms. We started with the living room. Who knows when we'll have the energy to tackle the dining room, but hey, we're making progress.

Here's some before shots.....

We just got this awesome new dining table, the Parsons Table, from West Elm. We're working on finding new chairs and a new chandelier.

And here's our living room, complete with a very dirty red couch and a very dirty scratchy carpet. They gotta go. We're thinking about a new couch from Ikea. Hopefully we can get up to Tampa soon to get it.

Of course the Ikea club chairs have seen better days too, so they'll be replaced with something a little more stylish.

And we've got a new solution for the TV in the works.

But the biggest change will be when the walls get painted a soft grey. This weekend we applied three coats of primer to the living room. This photo is after one coat of primer, so you can see why we needed three......

And here's a shot after three coats. Ok we ran out of primer after two coats behind the bookshelves, but books and things and two coats of paint will hide any wood showing through. It's so much brighter already!

Book shelf makeover

We decided to paint the bookshelves white to create a little more depth on the living room wall. I'm still trying to dig up some before pics. Of course we forgot before we started.....but here's the after shots.

I used a rock shaped like a boat I found in Maine as a bookend.

These rocks are from our trip to the mountains earlier this month. They make good bookends, too.