The Many Faces of Our Living Room

This is a picture of our living room the night we moved in. Literal blank space. And SO much carpet.

She has seen some changes over the years, which I've recently been reminded of looking through pictures. For amusement, I'll put the newest picture next to the oldest one for comparison; though it hardly seems fair to do so, given the many years and many iterations this room has been through in that time.

The first change, obviously, was wall paint and adding a chair rail (Dave's birthday present to me the first year in the house). It looked only slightly nicer than a glorified dorm room, thanks to the hodgepodge of furniture (including the couch from MY ACTUAL CHILDHOOD), questionable green curtains, and of course, still lots of white carpet.

Soon after, we made the best discovery, which was that under that white(ish), plush, wall-to-wall carpet, there were solid wood floors. This picture was literally one I sent to Dave while he was away for the weekend and I decided it would be a good time to peek under the carpet (I ended up ripping up the entire thing before he even came back, I was so excited).

The transition from carpet to hardwood was a great improvement, though the wood was a very distinct red oak color that I likely wouldn't choose myself. It also had some significant blemishes that we had to work around by strategically placed area rugs, but it was well worth it to get rid of the W2W carpet. Another simple (yet laborious) step we took was painting all the dark wood trim white. Some houses can get away with dark trim, but this house is SMALL and needs all the "light and airy" it can get.

Speaking of light and airy, the biggest transformation to date has definitely been refinishing the floors. You can see in the before picture how parts of the wood were patched and damaged. After they were repaired and sanded, we had a white stain applied to lighten it, making it look more like white oak than red.

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With my sights set on lighter flooring, I also brought the walls to a lighter neutral that was warm enough to work with the couch I found on Facebook Marketplace. (I painted before the refinishing so that I wouldn't be so paranoid about getting paint on the new floors.) I'm sure we'll never arrive at the *true* ending stage of this room (or any room, for that matter), but I at least feel like I can stay here for a little while without itching for the next project. ​

Oh - and you may have noticed the amazing book shelf addition to the top of our wall, which I don't want to gloss over. That was an incredible addition built by my father-in-law, who generously and meticulously measured out (and figured out) how to build a "floating" shelf that would hold our many hundreds of books. I love both how practical it is and how awesome it looks in this room. Definitely gave it a big push in its transformation from dorm room status!