Remodeling: The Living Room Wall

I'm so excited to finally be able to show you before and after pictures of our recent remodel project. For all intensive purposes, we "finished" last night. So, here we go. How do you like this wall, huh? Can anyone say "gun safe"? Hello, yes, that puppy is huge. All three of these lovely pieces of furniture stuck out about two feet from the wall, making the living room seem even smaller than it is. Yes, I had pictures up there, but I had just taken down our Christmas decoration before we started tearing out the wonderful dark wood paneling (painted over white). As I said in a previous post, we were just going for functionality when we moved in and remodeled the basics. Our goal this time around was to try adding a touch of class and make the space seem larger.

Michael, our friend Hiram and Hailey are working on tearing out the paneling.

Our other friend, Billy, helped Michael and Hiram put up the drywall. You can see there used to be a fireplace behind this wall. They had to do a lot of work to the wall to improve the structure before we even got the sheet rock up.

After putting up drywall, taping, mudding, texturing, sanding it all down because the texture was too thick, mudding the entire wall again to make it smooth, sanding, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, primering, texturing, primering again and two coats of paint, this wall was FINALLY done! Michael also put in a new door to the hobby room and did all the trim work. Lots of staining there. And lets not forget to mention the CLEANING that I'm still doing!

I'm telling you this was test for our marriage, too. At one point, we got into a big fight. After 24 hours (a long time for us) of not even being able to speak to each other, we finally came to a common understanding and were able to work together in relative peace and harmony from that point forward.

We finally got the fireplace hooked up yesterday and mantle put together. I have yet to decorate the mantle. I'm planning on placing a tall looks-real plant in the open space you see on the right side of the fireplace. The little side table you see on the left belonged to Stacie and I when we were kids. It is now holding our DVD player. Every single wall in my house is painted white. This was a huge step for me to paint this wall and my hallway. I think I'm addicted to color now. I want to repaint every room in the house now. Somebody stop me! I'll be posting the pictures of the kitchen wall next. So stay tuned!