Living Room

Have you ever thought to yourself, "We should paint the ceilings in this house blue?"
Of course you haven't, only crazy people do things like that. 

We rented some scaffolding and Jeffery painted the ceiling, replaced the crappy light fixtures, and painted the top of the walls.

For some reason we put the new fan up before we were done moving the scaffolding around, so me wheeling him across the floor was an exercise in trust.

Let's talk about the paint for a second. I found a swatch of Valspar (our paint of choice) online that I just loved, we brought it into Lowe's, and of course we couldn't find it. We looked through all the greens they had to offer and none of them came close to what I had originally wanted.

So we asked the guy at the paint desk, he and another woman managed to find the color in their computer. "Okay, we'll come back when it's done being mixed."

As we're walking Jeffery told me it wouldn't be done when we got back. He knows because every time that guy is working he forgets about the paint Jeffery has asked for. We come back 10 minutes later, paint hasn't been started, the guy is on break. The woman that actually knew what she was doing starts our paint.

In the end, I get my paint. This paint color is Valspar "True Sage."

Once we have the top part of the room done the rest should go quick right? It's just paint right? We're not ripping down walls right?

That would have been true had we not need to track down why we had outlets not receiving power. We did find out that around this window hadn't really been insulated, and that it had originally been a door out to the deck.

For the outlets, we believe when they added the track lighting over the door of the dining room they cut through the wire leading from outlet to outlet. We tracked it back to the eaves beside Henry's room but didn't want to rip up the sub-floor there. We just abandoned that line (marked it appropriately) and ran a new line through the crawlspace. Now we don't have a cut live wire hanging out next to where my boys sleep.

It was nice to see that gold come off the fireplace, and while I was hoping under the tile was brick like the fire box, it was not. So the plan is to leave the tile, and glue a stone facade on top.

The patch job they did when they swapped the door out was pretty bad anyway, the wall looks a lot better now.

Some primer and then it's like that never happened.

Some new track lighting over the fireplace.

A while ago we painted the entryway the same color we did the hallway upstairs, but I don't have any pictures of that for some reason. We painted the hallway downstairs the same color as the kitchen to provide a neutral transition between the green and the yellow.

Time for flooring. Jeffery's here laboring over humps in the sub-floor. He managed to get this one almost unnoticeable.

We started by flooring the entryway, and then laying down Ram board, moving the stuff to in front of the door, and then flooring backwards to the fireplace.

At one point this happened and stopped progress for a bit. Jeffery was nailing splines in, and as you can see this went horribly wrong.

Eventually he got it replaced, and flooring continued as normal.

Once into the main part of the room, it started to go really quickly, Jeffery would start a new row as I was at the saw cutting to end the rows. The kids stayed out of the way for the most part.

We added in new floor vents, and that finished up the floor.

View from the balcony.

Next up was to add trim around the room. Apparently this is the only picture I have of this process. Here Jeffery is in the process of painting the trim, and you can see this happened some time before Christmas.

With the trim up, the only thing left to do was the fireplace, so naturally, we moved all of our furniture out of our bedroom, and put it into this living room, to work on the bedroom instead, but that's a blog for another day.

 

Circling back to the fireplace. Since there was no brick under the tiles, and the tiles proved to be way too much of a hassle to remove, we went with a stone veneer product and some good ol' PL Premium.

Here's where we're stopping with the stone until we get our hearth.