First off the before of our space from the listings photos of our house when we purchased it.

Our family room resides in the middle of our house and is two stories tall with a wall of windows along one side that overlook our backyard. The interesting thing about our family room which I only recently realized when taking the pictures and thinking about this post is that almost every wall has something on it (wall of windows, kitchen, stairs, fireplace and doorway) that prevents a sofa from being placed with is back up against it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but when browsing living room designs, I tend to find myself wishing I could have a wall behind my sofa for an awesome gallery wall or art piece. But it is what it is, and that just means I needed to get creative with my design.

Luckily we already had this Karlstad sofa from Ikea at our old house, and it fit the space quite nicely. It works great to dive the living room from the kitchen (which is off to the left), but still leaves plenty of open space to move around it, along with a nice view of the back yard and fireplace.

As you can see in the above photos, one of the first things that we did was to change the flooring. I have mentioned this in several other of my home tour posts, but I will mention it again just because! We went with a wenge looking laminate because my husband and I both love dark wood floors. To save some money on demo costs, we went ahead and laid the laminate directly over the tile. We went with a super thick underlayment to prevent the grout lines from being an issue with the laminate, but so far so good and what a savings!

We also decided at that time to continue the laminate up the stairs and got rid of the stained carpet that lined them. As you can see below, the stair railing is the same honey oak from when we purchased the house and doesn’t go well with the dark floors. We plan to eventually sand and re-stain them to a dark walnut or ebony color. Just one of the many things on our to do list!

You can see the fireplace below, and if you look closely you can see that there are two different types of tile there. I already started to re-tile the hearth, but still have the surround yet to do. I am going with a herringbone marble that matches my kitchen backsplash, and can not wait until I finish it!

As far as the other elements in the room, the coffee table is a piece that I constructed (details on that soon!), the rug was a find from Home Goods (as were the baskets by the fireplace that hold all the kids toys), and the chevron chair was a thrift store makeover.

 

Now that you have an idea of where this room is currently, I can share with you the progress that it takes as we tackle future projects in here. And as I like to leave most posts in my home tour, a side by side of the before and after.