A Different Kind of Creativity

The past month has been hectic, crazy, productive and fun.  I've been too busy living to blog but things are slowing down at the moment (well at least for the next 30 minutes), so I thought I'd share one of the things we've been up to lately.

I've wanted to change my living room for quite some time now.  I was really craving a fun and colorful room in my house of brown.  So, I just took a leap and decided to make that colorful room the first room you see when you visit my home.  Call me crazy, but I just had to!

So I started with this:

This is what our living room has looked like for the past 9 years.  Not horrible, but that poor old couch had become more of a butt trap than anything else.  I always felt so bad if we had older people come to visit because it took at least one other person to help them back up!  LOL.

I knew I wanted to paint the walls a fresh, bright color, but wasn't going to do that while we still had the old couch.  I also knew when we replaced the couch, I would replace it with a love seat because that room is so small.

I finally found the chocolate brown love seat I was looking for and at a great price!  Now to get those walls painted.  I HATE to paint.  I love the end result, but it makes me completely exhausted just thinking about it!  So I hired it out.  My friend's son "volunteered" to come do it, so he and my daughter spent a couple of hours during Christmas break to do that for me.  So worth the $20 and pizza lunch to not have to touch a roller.

So here it is today:

I love how the chocolate contrasts with the aqua walls.  This is definitely not an "after" photo.  Still lots to be done....need to get a different (lighter colored, smaller) coffee table, and put some art on the walls, but I love being in there now.  Such a fun room to be in while the rest of the house is more serious.  And speaking of serious, after 9 years of planning, plotting, and saving, here's another thing we added to our house appeal:

We finally got our fireplace!  We love the warmth both physically and visually it adds to our room.  We also love that the furnace doesn't come on at all when the fireplace is going.  We decided to make it extra tall to help make the room visually taller.  It worked!

We'll be painting the rest of the room that khaki color (unfortunately, I'll probably be helping with that).  I'm looking for an old 6-pane window to put above the mantel as a backdrop for candlesticks, photos, and whatever else strikes my fancy. :)  Our daughter said, "now we need to get new couches because those don't look good anymore".  I totally agree.  But, that'll have to be another wait while we save some more. Oh, but see that black ottoman?  It completely holds all our Rock Band stuff!  Yep, 2 guitars, drums, pedal, etc.  Love it!

Well, looks like my 30 minutes are up.  Time to go be taxi mom again....

Stay tuned because Christmas isn't over yet!

Thanks for joining me at the Table today!