I can’t believe its been almost 3 months since I’ve shared a Throwback Thursday post. To be honest, having my kids home full-time (their preschool closed mid-March due to the coronavirus) has made photographing my house next to impossible somewhat challenging. But, my two oldest children started back at preschool this week so I am here to finally share one of the public spaces in our house – the living room. Although small, this room serves as our main TV watching space, entertaining space, and is most often found littered with toys. But, let’s start at the beginning.
The portion of our house that we call the living room today started as a one-car garage in 1950 – hence the long, narrow shape, second front door, and the oddly shaped window (there was once a garage door there). The previous owners converted this to a living area decades ago, but having two small and narrow living spaces (the original living room is on the other side of the wall in the left of the photo above) didn’t appeal to our tastes. When we bought our house, the floor plan looked like this:
What we call the living room was once the family room and there was a wall separating the two narrow living spaces. You can read more about the layout changes we made to our house in this post, but soon after we bought our house, we removed the wall between the family room and living room (and the portion that continued between the kitchen and dining room) to open the space. This allowed us to expand our kitchen and improve the flow of the public spaces in the house.
The wall separating the spaces still had the original knotty pine on the living room side (more on that later) as you can see in the top left photo above. We removed the pine and drywall within the first two weeks of owning our house and even with the studs still there, it was a huge improvement from where we started. After our permit was approved, we built two temporary walls on either side of the wall you see above, removed the wall, and added a beam to support the ceiling joists.
Its hard to tell in the photo above with all the 2x4s in such a small area but the lighter (newer) studs are the temporary walls and the darker studs are from the original wall. Once we knew the temporary walls could support the load of the ceiling joists, we removed the original wall.
You can tell where the wall used to be based on the flooring change. The original living room had lovely red oak flooring under the carpet and on the other side of the wall were layers of linoleum flooring from the kitchen and family room (which we removed down to the subfloor). The beam we used to replace the wall was about 12″ deep and we were able to recess half of it into the ceiling, so 6 inches of the beam are exposed below the ceiling line.
Removing this wall was one of the biggest structural changes we made to our house and definitely the most transformative. Our new layout looks like this:
Meanwhile, we also removed the majority of the drywall in order to add new electrical and insulation (there was no insulation in the exterior walls originally). You can also catch glimpses of the new plumbing for the kitchen. Once we finished the electrical and insulation, we started to button up the walls with new drywall.
The ceiling drywall was not in the best of shape and we had to patch parts of it from the wall removal process. Instead of replacing all of the ceiling drywall, we choose to add wood paneling (painted white) to the ceiling for that farmhouse/cottage feel. I primed and painted the knotty pine tongue and grove planks we bought at Home Depot before installing them. Then painted on two final coats of paint after we filled the nail holes and sanded the joints.
Next up was the floors. If you’ve read my master bedroom post, you know about the prep work it took to make these floors come back to life. Carpet covered the original living room and dining area red oak hardwoods and my father-in-law and brother-in-law removed approximately 1,457,382 staples from the floor before we could even begin to sand off the carpet glue residue. We purchased an additional 300 square feet of unfinished red oak flooring and installed it in the kitchen and previous one-car garage for a seamless look throughout this whole space.
Once we sanded all of the original flooring, we stained everything Minwax Dark Walnut and sealed it with polyurathane. I don’t have a great picture of the other side of the space, but you can see how the floors turned out in the picture below of our entry and dining area.
Here’s where the story goes South.
Let me remind you, at this point, the electrical was done. The sheetrock was up. The floors were finished. The paneling on the ceiling was installed. New light fixtures were functioning. The room was almost done. Then, the inspector came.
I can only imagine the conversation between him and my husband went something like this:
Inspector: “You called in a drywall inspection?”
My husband: “Yes, we are ready for the drywall to be inspected.”
Inspector: “But you’ve already covered the screws with drywall mud.”
My Husband: “Yes, but you can still see where the screws are and the spacing is per code.”
Inspector: “Well how do I know those are screws and not nails? They have different spacing requirements.”
My husband: “Pick any spot on this whole wall and I will remove the drywall mud and prove it is a screw. Any spot you want….”
Inspector: “Not going to happen. Did you insulate the exterior walls?”
My husband: “Yes”
Inspector: “Did you call me to inspect the insulation before you put up the drywall? I don’t remember inspecting the insulation…”
Insert palm to forehead emoji here. Ya’ll, we didn’t know what we didn’t know back then. Not only had we neglected to call in an inspection of the insulation before drywalling, we used the wrong insulation (R-13 instead of the required R-15 or higher). Remember how our running joke is that we did everything twice? Exhibit A. So, we removed all of the drywall (luckily we were able to reuse it when the time came) and insulation, and re-insulated the walls with the correct insulation. Then we made sure to call for an insulation inspection! We passed with flying colors, then re-drywalled the space (this process, of course, took months).
After refinishing the floors, we covered them with flooring protection – similar to a thin sheet of cardboard or thick sheet of chipboard (it comes in a large roll and we taped together long strips). We first drywalled in July of 2012 and the picture above was taken in November of 2012 – talk about 1 step forward and 8 steps backwards. After 7 months (February 2013), we finally finished installing the correct insulation (many other projects were happening during this time and we were slowly learning the correct order of projects that needed to be inspected by the city).
You can catch a sneak peek of the kitchen island in the picture above, complete with granite counters and stools (although, that’s our range sitting in the corner of the living room), so clearly a lot happened between the original drywalling in July 2012 and the RE-drywalling in March 2013. Did I mention we lived here during this entire process? We didn’t have kids yet, but still!
Within about a month of drywalling, we textured the walls, painted, and added baseboards and crown moulding. Remember the knotty pine planks on the wall we removed? We carefully removed each plank from the old living room wall, ripped the tongue and grove off each edge with our table saw, then sanded and primed each board. And that’s how we repurposed that outdated knotty pine into some pretty awesome baseboards.
We ended up with enough planks to complete the baseboards in the living/kitchen/dining area, the hallway, and both bedrooms in the front of the house (the master and the big kids’ room). The other rooms are completely separate from these spaces and no one has ever commented on the baseboards being slightly different in those rooms. We lived with the room like this for another 6 months before tackling the windows.
During that 6 months, we gained a fully functional kitchen but we were still taking a minimalistic approach to our decor, as you can see in the photo above. We finally had the TV mounted on the wall and the range was no longer in the living room though, so we were pretty proud. Then, we focused our attention on replacing the windows in our house. We started on the East side our house with the bedrooms, then worked our way around the house to the front. We worked one room at a time to make sure we could remove the old window(s) and install the new one(s) before running out of daylight. It was pretty silly to see the rooms with large holes exposed to the outdoors.
Its also pretty silly to have a room pretty much complete, then to go back and add new windows, but did you expect anything different? Since we did 95% of the work on this house ourselves, the scheduling of projects may seem odd but we did things as time and money allowed. Once the windows were in, we added sills and trim and this room was done!
In 2016 we added floating shelves around the TV and finally, in 2019, we upgraded our couch from the one my husband bought for his first apartment after college. Needless to say, we chose something a little less brown. I still consider this room a work in progress, as we started having kids right about the time it was ready for interior decorating and there are still a few things I haven’t found the perfect solution for. But, the room has made major strides from where we started.
And remember the wood ceiling panels? We would do that 1000 times over.
And because we always get questions about the “bench” standing in the corner, let me tell you a story.
Andrew, my husband, and I both attending the University of Kansas (rock chalk jayhawk!) and if you know anything about college sports, you might consider us to have a pretty good basketball team. The arena where KU plays their basketball games is called Allen Fieldhouse, built in 1955. When it was first built, all of the seating was comprised of wooden bleachers, like the one shown above (hence the spray painted seat assignment numbers). Throughout the years, the building has been renovated and some of the old wooden bleachers have been replaced with more modern seating. Andrew worked an internship in college with a man who’s father still had some of the original wooden bleachers because he played a part in the renovation. At the end of his internship, the man offered Andrew this “bench” because he knew what a huge Jayhawk fan he was. Ya’ll, there’s still dried chewing gum on the backside of this old bleacher (that’s how legit this thing is). Maybe one day we will turn it back into a functional bench, but for now, its a great conversation starter. Back in February, Andrew and I visited KU for a basketball game and Allen Fieldhouse is still as magical as ever (more on that in this post).
But back to the living room.
In an attempt to protect the arm rests on a very light colored couch, Andrew built wooden arm rest covers which conveniently double as a place to rest your drink (we don’t have a formal coffee table on account of this doubling as the playroom). The coasters are also homemade (more on them in this post), as are the covers to the wicker cubes that hold blankets and the occasional toy.
And to save you from having to scroll up and down, here are some before and afters.
And I know you didn’t forget about the knotty pine wall we removed.
As I mentioned earlier, I still have plans for this room. I’ve been eyeing a few larger rugs and I’d love to add a fiddle leaf fig (most likely faux) to bring in some greenery. And the decorative pillows you see came stock with the couch, so needless to say, they’re not my favorite. And the scrabble tile art above the couch is not centered on account of my husband hanging it on a screw that was already in the wall and declaring it “good enough.” But I say all of this to remind you (and myself) that rooms don’t come together overnight (unless you’re on the set of fixer upper and Joanna is at your house). Great looking rooms are created over time, one fantastic find after another. And because we have 5 people (3 of them under age six) living in a 1273 square foot house, my shelves aren’t perfectly styled, there’s toys on the bottom half of them, and I’m not trying to hide that. That’s the season of life we are in right now and it would be disingenuous for me to portray anything else. There will come a time when I can have perfectly styled built-ins, but until then, you’ll catch glimpses of Melissa & Doug’s finest and legos under our couch.
But we can still celebrate progress and look back to see how far we’ve come.
If you are curious about where I found any of the items you see in my living room, you can find a list of sources for the living room on my Our House page. Have you been working on any living room projects lately? I’d love to hear about them. Comment below or connect with me on instagram @elleandjaydesign.
