I can’t believe we’ve lived in our home for almost two years now and we’ve already done our second living room makeover! I feel like on the first go round, we just did the basics to make it livable for us. I couldn’t stand the dark red walls!! I mean, I would never have been able to stand looking at them all day. The reclaimed wood wall, did come after the paint job but was our first DIY project in our living room. Painting the discolored wall heater cover was also something I did early on because I really didn’t like looking at it. The wall heater was an eyesore but to make it livable for me I chose to paint it a matte black and turn it into a focal point since there was no way to hide it. Being that the wall heater was smack dab in the middle of our only big wall, I knew it was something I really wanted to change but wasn’t as big a priority as getting our kitchen done or updating our laundry room. So finally, with the helpful push of baby Adney on the way, Justin and I decided it was time to finish the living room makeover and get it the way we really wanted from the start.
For starters, the wall heater was a must go! Thankfully my father-in-law was able to really help us out with this. During the week, when Justin and I were at work, he would come over to our house and work on not only tying off the gas to the wall heater but also removing and then drywalling the space where the wall heater used to be. Justin had the brilliant idea of turing the top portion of the now open space into a niche. I loved the idea and Kent was able to turn it into a reality. He did such an amazing job with this project and even was able to match the texture on the walls. Now I was never a huge fan of the wall texture but since we can’t remove it right now having it all blend in was really important. Now looking at it, you would never know that it wasn’t like that originally.
Next, since our only heat for the living room was removed we decided to put in a fireplace. I really wanted an electric fireplace to take advantage of our solar and so I found an electric fireplace online that I liked. Just a little disclaimer…you really need to be careful when ordering a fireplace online that you are purchasing the correct model. I read built-in and took that to mean that the fireplace could be built-in to the mantel we were making and that it would be flush mount with the tile. That is not what the fireplace company meant when they said built-in. The actually had the exact same fireplace flush-mount which was of course the model I really wanted to order but since we had already taken the fireplace out of the box and started to install it before we realized the mistake there was no going back. Luckily, Justin is super handy and came up with an excellent solution.
To give us some extra storage we also decided to make built-ins on either side of the fireplace. I ordered the units from Ikea and Justin and his dad sized the fireplace mantel to fit the rest of the wall so that it looked completely built-in. We chose to have one side open shelves and the other side with cabinet doors so that we could hide some of our clutter but still be able to turn the TV on and off without having to open doors each time. We went with white to lighten up the space since our reclaimed wood wall is a little dark. The honeycomb marble tiles add a nice pattern to the space and I think they look nice against the rustic reclaimed wood wall.
Thankfully we didn’t have to move our wall mounted TV at all. Since the reclaimed wood wall was built around it and all the TV wires and cords were strategically placed behind the wall. It would have been a pain if we had to remove the entire wall and put it back together. To get the fireplace and built-ins to not come out into our living room too far we removed the reclaimed wood planks that were on the lower half of the wall.
I am so pleased with the way it all turned out. The main reason for all this change, was so that we could ditch our old sofa that I bought from someone off craigslist when we were living in Menlo Park and swap in a nice sectional sofa. Now we have more seating available for when people come over to visit and there will be room for the baby to sit with us. Also, I was really big on getting a new sofa before baby Adney arrived because I didn’t like the idea of him being on an old sofa.
Shop living room decor:
