From the moment we bought the house in 1990, I have loathed the family room. For some ungodly reason, the original owners had put stucco on the walls with fake beams and dark wood on the walls. At one point, I painted the dark wood to make it blend in with the walls, but it was still ugly. A few years ago, we bought a lovely new modern TV stand and shelving unit, and I was so disappointed when we set it up in the room, because this great clean modern piece looked out of place. Now we have a space we love, and our more modern furniture looks and feels great.
Here is the room in 2000, after painting the wood on the walls. It seems that most of our digital pictures of this room were taken at Christmas, where we started our day with stockings!
Now, like all good families, we waited till the kids were almost out of the house before we actually started fixing it up. Something to do with money? We replaced all our windows this fall with Renewal by Andersen windows. Wow what a difference! The old windows were single pane, and we always had to cover up with 3M plastic to keep the house warm in the winter. Not any more! While we were at it, we had contractors come in and rip out the yucky stucco, re-drywall that room, and also replaced the back door to match the windows. Then we put in a lovely hickory engineered floor, painted the room in bright colors, replaced the door shade, and VOILA – a whole new space. After that, we replaced the wood-burning fireplace with a gas insert – I think we have actually turned the coldest room into the warmest room just in time for our deep dark winter.
Before we replaced the fireplace, this was the view looking in from the mudroom/garage entry:
View of new Ikea couch:
View out of room:
We replaced our cold and smelly wood-burning fireplace with a Heat & Glo gas insert. It has been a timely upgrade! It even makes the old bricks look okay.
Here is Christmas in the new space:
Bernoulli (and Tesla) love this new source of heat.
Color scheme for re-decorating (love the Dutch Boy paint):
