Living Room

The living room was one of our very first projects because in just a few weeks my mom would arrive in a moving truck carrying my grand piano. Since pianos generally don't respond well to wet plaster falling from the ceiling as we scrape off popcorn, or sawdust from crown molding and refinishing floors, or splatter of wet paint...we had to hurry.

I managed to take only two pictures of the room before we got to work.  The windows on the left look over the street and the windows on the right to our neighbors house. 

This is a view from inside the living room facing the hallway to the dining room and kitchen. I have to point out the crown molding in this room which was about an inch lower than the ceiling.  We thought it was just poorly installed (like many features of our new house).  However, after a conversation with our next door neighbors, we learned that the gap was intentional.  These were "picture moldings" and can be used as a ledge to hang frames without putting nails in the wall.  Too bad we had already replaced them with crown molding from Lowes.

Also, note that the wall with the door was covered in plywood paneling that was not in great shape.  Chris was adamant that it come off and that we put in french doors going into the dining room (which had been converted into a bedroom).  I wasn't sure.

Here is what we found when we took the paneling down...a built in frame for some French doors. Just like Chris wanted.  The wall needed some major reconstruction to be smooth enough for paint.  Amazing what you can do with a wall patch, putty, and sand paper.  Not to mention fresh paint.

This was built into the floor of the resurfaced opening...proof that double doors used to connect the living and dining room.

This is the wall between the windows and the front door.  The cream paint you saw earlier was peeling and bubbling up in a few places.  Without thinking, I started scraping off the paint.  It came off really well at first...but eventually Chris and I ended up scraping the entire wall.  We also had to use the dry wall mud to help smooth out some of the flaws.

As we peeled of the cream paint, we found the original pale green paint.  We tried to match it using Behr's Southern Breeze. 

We learned the hard way that Frog tape works much better at not removing the paint underneath.  This thick blue tape had a tendency of sticking too well.  But either way, I was too exited at the look of the new room to finish peeling the tape off before snapping a photo. 

Installing double french doors that are evenly spaced, can open and close one at a time, and still be secured to less than straight walls can be quite a challenge.  Getting those things right took many, many hours. As we kept taking out the screws to shim it this way or that, I was getting more and more paranoid that the doors would come crashing down and shatter.   Fortunately the closest they came to shattering was me wanting to kick at the doors at 11:30 on a Saturday night trying to get them to work.

Also, I should point out the molding framing these doors and the other doorway leading to the hallway.  We wanted to use molding that coordinated with the the rest of the room.  We looked into ordering custom made molding to match, but since the original moldings of our house are so thick (and beautiful) it would have been over $1,000.  An amount we did not want to spend on a handful of door frames. 

So, using a recommendation from a man at the local lumber store, we took molding from less conspicuous places (closets, stairs to cellar, etc) and refashioned them for the living room doors.  We still had to buy molding, but it didn't have to match perfectly and we were able to find some (2 hours away) that was still nice and looked fairly similar, but for about half the cost. Hooray!

Finished product...floors, molding, furniture and all.

First sewing project: cream pillows for the enormous couch.  I still have a lot to lean about sewing, but thanks to the new gift from my mother, I'll have lots of opportunities to practice.  Thanks again mom!