"Before" And "After"

Before Christmas we were on a roll. We finally felt inspired to get started ... to make this house "ours" after having lived here nearly 1 1/2 years (following our housefire). We were painting and patching and "decorating". It was exhausting, mostly because we were trying to get it all finished before company arrived and before the holidays ..... but it was sooooooooo worth it !
The Cherubs spent hours and hours (literally !) scraping the 1980's border from the walls of our family room with 1" putty knives. It was the only tool that worked ! This "quality" (in materials, not in "beauty") border was put up with INDUSTRIAL strength adhesive -- left untouched by sanding, steel wool, countless brands of wallpaper stripper, and steam. But finally .... the Cherubs won .... after experimenting and finding that Murphy's Oil Soap mixed with HOT water would soften the border edges just enough to get under them with the putty knives. So, they removed the whole border wall by wall, scraping it off bit by bit in this manner. Then, we spent many more hours applying spackle and then sanding ... and sanding .... and sanding.

Bottom border removed, and now onto the top border.

The awful border and a close up of the awful Country Blue walls (circa late 1980's).

After a lot of spackle and sanding (and tons of labor), we applied 2 heavy coats of Kilz primer to cover the stains and spackling, followed by three coats of paint .... TA DA !!

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The family room is now a lovely color called CREAM IN YOUR COFFEE which matches beautifully with the tan woodwork that was already here (and works so well for our big family that we decided not to change it).

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For Christmas, DadToCherubs bought new Family Room furniture for us .... finally being able to sit on the couch without fear of being poked by the broken boards is such a treat. HA ! In addition to the normal family room peices (couch, etc), he added a Game Table. The Game Table is a small matching dining set for the purpose of playing board games and assembling puzzles. This photo (above) is of the table set. The Game Table has gotten more use that any of the other pieces, by Cherubs playing board games and doing puzzles (which Santa brought a lot of this year !).

And this photo (above) is of the rest of the family room .... the Game Table would be in the bottom right of this photo if it were a wide-enough shot.

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The family room turned out so well; better than we had hoped. It is bright and cheery, and also warm and cozy. And it is SIMPLE .... which seems to be our new favorite "style" .... earth tones and simple.

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The last finishing touch will be the Art .... we ordered some prints that will hopefully arrive someday, which we will then frame and hang.

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At last .... OUR family room ....

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We also painted the dining room and the master bathroom during our holiday break, and will post photos of those projects soon.

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Our next projects will be the school room, the sun porch (which will be our art studio / hobby space), and the master bedroom .... then it will be time to plant the garden again.