Finished family room....before and after

I consider myself to still be fairly new at this blogging thing and for all of the things I have posted, I have not done very many "before and after" posts. I did post the process of redoing my son's room (the very first room to be painted and finished in the house). You can check that out here if you are interested.

Now that I have a few rooms that are mostly dec'ed out, I thought I'd like to share them. Family room today.....office next week.

The catalyst for the room redo was the carpet....our new house had almost-white carpet. Between two kids and a dog, it got dirty so fast. We decided to have new carpet installed in that room. Since we had to take EVERYTHING out of the room, we thought it would be a good time to restart from scratch. So, we bought a new TV and went from there. Our new carpet is one of those new speckled and shaggy berbers and I love it because it hides everything.

So...here are some before pics of our living room. It is one big room, combined with the kitchen, separated by a counter/ledge. Unfortunately, I have no true before pictures....the only pictures I could dig up include people since all of the pics were taken before I started blogging. Just so you know, I now take pictures around the house and I get a look from my husband like, "You're taking a picture of that?"

Before....

So, the paint was a very neutral tan color and you can see in the first pic, our furniture that fit wonderfully in our old house looked squatty in our new house with higher ceilings. Also, our family room is a bit smaller than our old one, so the amount of floor space our old TV cabinet took up was eating up a lot of play space for the kids. In the second pic, you can see all of the boxes of shelves we had bought that were yet to be put together.

Here are a few "during" pictures as I finished up the kitchen painting. I like bold and saturated colors.

The kitchen had been a yellowy green color. Once I did the cutting-in, Fred commented..."I didn't know our kitchen was lime green?" I had doubted the paint color a little until it was all finished and now I love it.

When we were looking for ideas on how to configure our new room, we went to IKEA and walked around the showroom area. We had originally thought to get just a TV stand and do something else to fill in the wall space.....until we stopped in front of one room that had a wall of shelves that looked like built-ins. When Freddie said, "I love that," I thought BINGO! One reason we loved it so much was that we are both huge book-lovers and readers. We had books all over the house in different places, so it was appealing to have a place to keep all of the books together.

And here is the after....

We bought the Billy shelves from IKEA. They come in so many different sizes that you can find what fits your needs and space. We also used an extender-shelf that you fit onto the top of the tall shelf unit to add some more height. I also installed some lights to illuminate the center bridge piece over the TV, as well as some lights that stick out over the bookshelves that illuminate the shelves. They are on timers so they come on in the evening and turn themselves off.

We also sorted all of the books and arranged them in a systematic way. If you look at the top pic, you can also see a shelf that is tilted to show magazines. I love this about our new shelves. I'll snap a pic up close and post it later this week, along with a few other details about the room, including some pics of the lights on and what they look like.

We also had bought--along the way--a new coffee table, made new valances (see those here)and bought a new couch.  It did take us a while, but we are so happy.

Whew!