It's been awhile since I've posted about our house and we definitely have been busy these past couple of months!
This past weekend, we started tackling the front rooms of our house. This consists of the entryway, the formal living room, and the dining room. While these are three very distinct rooms that will have to be dealt with in three rather different ways, we've been lumping them together for one simple reason: they will all be the same color when we're done.
We first started talking about painting the formal living room because it probably needs the most work of any room in the house, besides the master bedroom. There were two problems we ran into when deciding on paint colors. First, the fireplace.
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| Living room fireplace |
This is a very typical Southwest fireplace. Conical corner placement, stucco texture, the Latin tiles. We could either redo the whole fireplace or pick a color that would work with the existing feel. While the plan of record is to scrap it all eventually, it will be much easier and cheaper to just accommodate it for now.
Secondly, the living room archway opens up to the entry way and the dining room. This meant that the color across these three rooms needed to coordinate. This is actually a lot more difficult than it seems. The living room and dining room have giant windows, filling the space with bright, South facing sun through most of the day while the entry gets a small amount of indirect natural light from the small window above the door. Any darker shade would work in the living and dining rooms, but feel claustrophobic in the entryway, while a light color would be very hard to fit with the fireplace without being some shade of tan. I hate tan...
After a lot of thinking about it, we decided on one color for all three rooms and settled on a color. We started by painting the entry way because we didn't have to remove any furniture. Here's the before (including the light that came with the house):
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| Entry Way: Before |
And here's the after (well, more like the almost finished)!
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| Entry Way: After (Almost) |
We went with yellow! It's the perfect color for these rooms. In some light, this color almost looks off white. In others, it's deep and buttery. Against the dark wood, it's warm and almost has that Southwest feel we needed, but against clean white, it's almost cool and country cottage-y.We also decided to paint the ceiling bright white. If we had painted it yellow, it would have made the room feel smaller, but the white keeps it light and airy. You may also notice how shiny the paint is. We accidentally bought semi-gloss and didn't realize it until it was too late, but it actually works in our favor because it reflects light in the small space and lightens it up.
(Side Note: I am a horrible photographer. The color really doesn't come across well in the picture above. When compared to my stubby, little hand, this is a more realistic color.
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| My crazy, little hand. Oh, and some paint! |
The problem we have now is choosing a new light fixture. We were originally going to put the old one back up until we found one we liked. However, once we got it off the ceiling and got a close up look at it, we can't bring ourselves to put it back up. It's just too wrong.
So, after a late night trip to Lowe's on Saturday night we came home with this beauty.
It looks vintage, classic, simple, and unique. It was everything we wanted, but it was just too small. With a diameter less than a foot, it just didn't fill the space.
Now, with almost every free second I have, I've been researching chandeliers and pendant lights. But I just can't seem to find anything that feels right. Here are some of my favorites, but I'm not really sold on any of them. There's no real theme, but they all have the same things (for the most part) in common with the one we are returning: vintage, classic, simple, and unique.
Any opinions?
I like the Lowes one but I do love the World Market or Overstock best with the area. Can't wait to see how it turns out.
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