Living Room update #1

We made some changes in the living room. It's not exactly how I want the end result to be, but we are getting there slowly but surely.

OK, so the changes we made, are that we painted the front door black.

Here is how the door looked before I painted it:

Now it looks like this:

So much better!



And the other change we made was to this wall, the one with all of the black framed pictures and the giant hutch thing:

I decided I wanted more pictures on this wall, and I wanted them closer together.

So, Tim and I collected frames from garage sales and thrift stores for the last several months, and I painted them all black.

A few weekends ago, I hung them all up,

Some of the frames in the above picture don't have any photos in them. I was just going to order the photos in the sizes I needed for each frame when I decided I didn't like the way the whole wall looked.

It's just too busy. Too much.

I do like the way the pictures look, but I just don't like the arrangement on that particular wall. The hutch thing with the mirror is too big and with all of those pictures behind it it's just way too much for this little room.

So....I spent another weekend removing all of the pictures, and filling in a million little nail holes.
My son Allen came over to help me with the puttying and the sanding while Timmy was at work.

 Some of the little doo-dads I had hanging on the wall between the pictures were glued on. (genius, I know) so when I pried the doo-dads off, some of the wallpaper came with it.

Lookie there, it's 60 year old wallpaper under 12 layers of paint!!

It's the same wallpaper that is still in our hallway closet

Isn't it purty?

I can not imagine the entire living room looking like this:

In my defense, I need to say that the reason I painted over the existing wallpaper in the living room when we moved in was 1. It was already painted, and it was easy to just put my own color over it. and 2, When we moved in here 3 years ago, we didn't really know if this house was a keeper or not. Tim and I decided we would just paint the  living room, and possibly remove all of the wallpaper at a later date if we planned to stay and renovate the house.

We did decide to stay (for now. We will most likely be here about 5 more years), and we have begun to renovate the house. Removing the wallpaper in the living room is on the to-do list, but it will be several years down the road when we actually get to it. I have a feeling the wallpaper removing will also cause me to want to completely re-decorate the entire living room in a whole new color scheme. I'll have to put more thought into that.


So, we patched the wall, where my glue ripped big chunks out of the layers of painted wallpaper

It took an entire day to fill all the holes, sand everything and then paint 2 coats of  paint.

The wall looked pretty good when we were done!

Then I came up with a more toned-down look for this living room wall.


A smaller grouping on the left side.

A map of St Louis in the middle.

And 3 pictures from our wedding/honeymoon on the right.

I like this MUCH BETTER than all of the frames I had on there before.




OK, for comparison here are the 2 before's and the final after:

First try, lots of pics hanging on the wall:

Second try, even more pics on the wall:

Final (for now). For this wall, less is more. I like this much better: