Before & After - The Family Room

The original dining room featured a wall of cabinets, built-in bookshelf, exposed cedar beam and fake-slate linoleum tile.  Hardly charming, and not terribly functional or attractive.  

We tried our best to make the dining room presentable, but it was a space that never seemed to work well for us.  We always found it odd that such a small house would have such a large dining room...

and that's why we turned it into our family room!

 We ripped out the lower and upper cabinets to create a space for our TV and Finley's books and toys.

We opted to keep the built-in bookshelf because it was actually useful.  To add a little pizzaz to it, I stenciled this design (free courtesy of Jones Design Company) along the back of the bookshelf to mimic wallpaper.  All in all, the stencil project probably took around 3 hours, which was time well spent in my book.

 We painted the beam to help it blend in a bit better and we ripped out four (4!!) layers of linoleum and put down wood floors.  Looking at the floors still makes me a happy girl!  In addition to ripping out the cabinets on what is now the TV wall, we also ripped out a very randomly placed lower cabinet that was to the right of the sliding glass door.  My orange reading chair is now in its place.  

Here is the view of the room from the kitchen.

Before & After - The Bathroom

Who doesn't love some good before and after pictures?  I thought we'd start the house tour off with the smallest room in our house - the good, old bathroom!

 Here are the two wallpapers in the bathroom...whoever put them together has to be color blind!

 Gray tile on the floors, walls and in the tub...and what bathroom wouldn't be complete without a brown shaggy toilet seat cover?!?  I wish I had a better picture of the entire bathroom because it was a sight!  It had a large, three-mirror medicine cabinet that took up the entire wall above the sink and it also features a row of huge globe lights, a la Hollywood make-up mirror light.  Yikes bikes!

The bathroom now!  Out of any room in the house, the bathroom got the biggest overhaul.  It was taken down to the studs and re-built with all new things - the only thing we kept was the pedestal sink.  

 We opted to get rid of the glass door in favor of a shower curtain.  When you only have one bathroom, it's nice to be able to hide all of your family's many shower and bath products.  I tried to keep the room fairly neutral with an array of whites and tans, drawing inspiration from this Crate & Barrel shower curtain.  

 Probably my husband's favorite part of the room - the larger shower head that was raised so that his 

6' 4" self can easily fit under it.  

To keep things simpler, we used the same tile on the floor and for the bath surround.