Living Room Updates!

The farmhouse actually has a pretty good floor plan for such an old house.  The living room is pretty open to the kitchen, and most of the house gets a lot of natural light.  

Unfortunately, the living room barely gets any.  :/  There's only 1 small window in the front of the living room, and it gets minimal light because of the roof over the front patio.  So, it's consistently really hard to take pictures of the living room.  :( There was a LOT of sun the day we closed, so I did manage to get these pictures of the living room before we moved in.

Painting the living room was one of the first things on my agenda after getting fairly settled in, because I had a box filled with picture frames that I wanted to get on the wall.  

For the living room, we used the same paint as the kitchen - the Behr Premium Plus Ultra Paint and Primer in one, and we chose a light peachy/rosy color scheme for the living room.  I initially just painted the back wall (because that's where I was putting the pictures) and we decided to make it an accent wall with a slightly darker color.  We tried to pick a color that wasn't too dark, however, because we definitely didn't want the living room to end up dark as a cave.

It definitely would have been easier to paint before moving in...

I actually took the color and wrapped it around into the kitchen as well.  I ended up really liking the mauve-ish pink color.  It felt very warm and homey.  :)

After getting the wall painted, I could finally put all the pictures back up again. That was actually a lot more tedious than painting.  I had spent hours and hours (and hundreds of dollars on frames) developing a perfect 11ft x 3ft picture collage in the condo -->

only to realize that I did not have a single 11ft long wall in the farmhouse... 

OMG. *sigh*

So I ended up having to formulate a new design to fit the living room wall in the farmhouse.  I had to buy 1 more frame to make it work - and that poor frame is still empty.  But someday, it'll be the perfect spot for a wedding picture!

Clint is busy playing Diablo III on a Saturday morning.
He just loves playing Diablo III in front of our beautiful picture collage! 

Now that I'm not in a super modern lofty condo, I might end up switching back to color pictures, but for now I'm happy with it!

Storage!

One of the greatest things about our new house is the mudroom, a big room filled with laundry vessels and ample room for storage. It was hard to tell *what* exactly the mudroom was when we were looking at the advertisement for this house, as there was a bed right next to the washer and dryer... but once it was cleared out, the mudroom became wonderfully unambiguous.  :)

Apparently I only took 1 picture of the mudroom before moving in, and its only one side of the L-shaped room.

Aside from the pergo floors, the room is actually quite pleasant. There's a side door to the backyard (convenient for the doggy door for that biz biz), and there's a lot of light thanks to 3 windows and a windowed door.  The room is also nicely fitted with Bosch washer + dryer.  SUPER QUIET.  amazing.

As soon as I saw the mudroom, I knew it would make for some excellent extra pantry space!  SALE SHOPPING + EXTREME COUPONING here I come!!!  After looking around all over for suitable modular storage systems, we finally decided on a set from Ikea. 

(I'll be honest, I told myself once I "grew up" and "bought a house" I would stop buying stuff from Ikea.  Well, I lied to myself.  I bought a modular entertainment center/storage system for the condo, and now we have one for the farmhouse.  What can I say, Ikea rocks modular storage!)

This is the only "in progress" picture.  Despite a power outage in the middle of assembly, set up was going smoothly until we had to try to figure out how to attach the drawer fronts.  Normally, this would be a simple task.  However, (I could be wrong), as far as I could tell, Ikea didn't sell drawer fronts that were full size - only short drawer fronts, as seen below. I had these short drawers in the entertainment center in my old condo - they were convenient because you could just shove a shelf in there, have a closed drawer and then have an open front for accessories such as cable boxes/PS3s/wii's/original nintendos/routers/etc.  

short drawers convenient in an entertainment, as seen in my bmore condo.

However, the short drawers were not suitable for a closed, we-want-it-to-look-pretty storage system, so we bought the regular sized doors (like in the above TV cabinets on the entertainment center), and had to find a way to attach them to the drawers.  It was our best attempt at ikeahacking.  (Really, we just used 4 L=shaped brackets per drawer).  We bought the handle hardware at Lowes - this handle design was just so much cuter than the ones available at Ikea.

In the end, I think it turned out really well.  I am pleased with the way the storage looks and frames the window.  Unfortunately the room was a bit small to get a full picture of the storage system.

More importantly, however, the storage system has become an excellent new kitty condo with large windows for their entertainment.  

I may or may not have doused the top of the entertainment center in
catnip spray to get all of the cats up there at once...

All in all, storage system mission = SUCCESS!

Oh yeah - to further improve our storage capabilities, we also bought a huge freezer.  So far, it is really quiet and keeps everything really cold!  I can't wait to stock up on meats and make a bunch of frozen meals (and frozen crock pot meals) for us.

I also don't mind the giant ice cream we have sitting in there. I think its like 5 gallons of orange/vanilla swirl.  :)  Woot!