Home Renovation: Family Room

The end of March marked 4 years in this home. It was no surprise when we bought this house that it was going to be a bit of a project home. But it had the square footage we needed and a huge yard that appealed to us.  Little by little over the years we've put in hard work (and money) into fixing the place up and it's fun to watch the place transform.  

When we bought the house, the family room was a bit of a mess. We didn't want a wood burning fireplace but wanted the option of putting in a gas fireplace someday. So we took out the wood stove and walled it in. We brought up the floor so it was no longer a sunken space and replaced the carpet. That got us through the first 4 years.

The family room when we moved in 4 years ago: 

Family room after we raised it and put in new carpet: 

As we've lived here longer and gotten through those big initial projects, we've been able to go back and put a little bit more effort into fixing things up. In the fall we conquered our living room and dining room. We also replaced our old furniture in the family room. Four kids can wear out carpet quickly so we knew we wanted to come back through and get rid of all the carpet on the first floor.  Initially that was all we set out to accomplish on this project. 

Fortunately we had a gap week in kids activities to try and get all this accomplished.  The flooring alone kept us up for several late nights. 

And just when we thought we were almost done, we discovered at midnight that three of our boxes of flooring were damaged and that it would be 1-2 weeks before the replacement flooring would arrive. So we had to live with the space looking like this for about 10 days:

The project did not come without some battle scars as Peter had about 1000 pounds of plywood land on his legs with some deep bruises and scratches.  He's lucky that was all that happened because it could have been much worse! 

Because of this delay in getting flooring, we ended up deciding to go "big" on the room. Mind you, none of this was our plan when we set out to ONLY floor this room.

But a couple of trips to Ikea later 

And a new paint scheme later 

And several late nights in those 10 days 

Heck we even completed ANOTHER project that was started but never actually completed when we bought this place 4 years ago - trim work fully up and all existing caulked and repainted! 

It was a really big job and we're pretty exhausted but the hard work totally paid off as you can see for yourself! 

Before: 

After: 

I am completely happy with how the downstairs looks now!  Of course there is always a long list of projects still to come, but it is exciting and fun to little by little work and accomplish these things!