New Year, New Room

Happy New Year!

I'm feeling some renewed excitement about this little blog...gonna try to make it last!  Just downloaded Adobe Lightroom for photo editing, plus took some pics of a few house projects we're up to.

We have the coolest "bonus" living space in this house, which I love.  Until recently, it's mostly been the collection place for all the things we didn't have a real spot for.  But we've been working away at it slowly, and it's finally starting to feel useful.

Here are some before shots of the room:

Prepping the room for painting (it was a well-loved playroom before :)

Here's a progress of the colour: Site White by Sherwin Williams

We decided to do an accent wall in here - Loyal Blue by Sherwin Williams.

This is where I start to have doubts...it seemed really overpowering when all the other walls were blank.  Plus, the first few coats were much brighter blue than I was wanting.  But we pressed on, planning to put white bookcases on the lower half of the wall.

Let's just say it took a WHOLE gallon to get it to the right colour!

It's a huge wall!  See what I mean about feeling a bit menacing...

But here it is with the bookcases - much better!  They are actually the Billy bookcases from Ikea.  The 2 on the outside + the 1 in the centre are the single wide size.  Then 2 double wide to each side of the centre (further down you can see them open).  This picture is before we put on the wood top...

Like I said, the collection spot.

We've since bought a new couch (I'll post that soon!) so our old one came upstairs.  I'm planning to paint my own BIG piece of art to go above the couch - I'm thinking some navy, turquoise, gold?  Something abstract.

Here's one going down the stairs - the paint looks great, but the wall is so empty!

Here's an updated view of the blue wall, with the wood on top of the bookcases.  We had a friend find the wood and cut it for us, then we stained and varnished it.  We bought those lamps at a garage sale - they have new shades (from Target), but need to be spray painted.

Here they are open!  So nice to get the books out of boxes and onto shelves.  Also love that the doors close to look less cluttered.

I found this pillow at Chapters and had to bring it home.  Those are the colours I was dreaming about!
Bryce picked up the chairs at the MCC Thrift in Elmira, then we painted them.

We've come a long way from this...

To this...

But still have a long ways to go!  Coming soon I'll share some more pics of that new desk nook!