living room before & after

Now that our built-ins are complete, I'm happy to share with you a little peek at our living room with some before & after photos. Enjoy!

Here's the before photos, from the MLS listing. Beautiful, but a little more traditional than our taste. They also give you a shot into the kitchen/dining area, but I'm saving those new photos for another day :)

And here is what our space looks like now.

Really, the only thing we did was paint and change out the curtains, but it made such a difference! We painted the entire space "Notre Dame" by Valspar, which completely brightened up the space. The room was builder-grade beige with an accent wall in dark brown. The chocolate wall (the one with 8 windows) took two coats. The kitchen and dining area were a variety of sage greens, and we took this grey into those rooms as well, really giving the entire space a nice sense of unity and openness.

The heavy, sage black-out curtains were taken down, shortened, and put in the media room and they're perfect there. These lighter curtains really allow for maximum light flow into the room. I actually constructed them myself by sewing two curtain panels together, white on top and almost-charcoal grey on the bottom. There was no way I was ever going to find what I wanted, for the right price, 130-ish inches long. Naturally the solution was to DIM (do it myself).

When you walk in our front door, you look straight through the entry way into this room. We wanted to keep it simple, clean, and fun since it's the central hub of our home. There's no television in here, so the focus can remain on just being together with friends and family. 

The built-in shelves are perfect here, just the finishing touch our home needed to make it more "homey".

Behind the couch is a little collage of our family photos taken by our fabulous friend Lindsay Horn, who I've known since our college days and before her photog days. We've used her to take portraits of our family since we were newlyweds. If you're in the Dallas area, I highly recommend her! Can't say enough about her :) And no, she didn't pay me to say that. I kept the collage area small (but careful not to let it be swallowed by the wall), allowing space to add onto later.

There's still a few empty spaces, like above the piano and the shelves, that need some love & personality, but I'm working on it :) Also I think the fireplace needs a makeover, but I'm keeping my mouth shut for now.

I feel like every project, no matter how big or small, has some sort of regretful "oops moment", and if you're lucky, it's reversible. At one point, I had a bad great idea to paint the back of our nook a nice peacock blue as an accent, but we wound up hating it, so I painted over that, too. 

Our old house only had one main open living area, and this house has two, more distinct living areas (one of which was a "formal" living room which has since been deemed "the media room"). Needless to say we had to buy some more furniture, and fell in love with our new couches and coffee table from Haverty's. We also inherited a piano, which we tinker on all day long. 

Want to see some side-by-side shots?

This room is SO fun and I think really reflects the personality of our family. Before it was almost too formal, and we wanted it to be a comfortable space where we can gather together, kick up our feet, and have a good time. It was also a little too simple for me, so naturally I had to add some personality with color and unique touches to welcome you in. While the changes we made really don't seem that major, the overall feeling of the room has drastically transformed. There's a reason it's called a "living" room!

Thanks for stepping in to our home today! Can you smell the coffee?
Happy Monday!