Family Room

I’ve neglected to show the sorry state of our family room, that is open to our dining room and kind of crucial to the whole wallpaper dilemma that was supposed to be attacked this summer but is still untouched. This room is the hub of the house. It has the best fireplace rock wall, is a bit SUNKEN, opens to the backyard patio, sees a ton of daily use, and is the room that really sold me on the house. But we’re currently operating in a love/hate relationship. Crazy in love with the space and the potential, but not crazy about the present execution. This room is definitely in “before” condition. We moved in and have done NOTHING else.At this point, the furniture is haphazardly slapped together and nonsensical things have hastily been hung off-center on the walls in the hope of distracting from the dingy wall grossness. The to-do list in here is fairly straight forward. Paint all walls and ceilings, and figure out the furniture arrangement. Some furniture swapping from other rooms will need to happen because things are not synthesizing as is. (This is technically the living room but the TV arbitrarily ended up here on move in day and it worked so it’s never left and now it’s the family room, and the family room is the den.)So why has it been neglected for 2 years? I blame the wood floor install. Everything bottlenecked behind that because we were too lazy to find another place to store the boxes and boxes of hardwood floors, that you can see piled up behind the chair along the wall below. We were too lazy to move them even for painting. This is the thinned out stack that, up until a few weeks ago, was 3 times bigger (because the hall floors are mostly completed!). Here’s what we are currently working with. The couch (and matching chair) are a more recent purchase with a boring long story behind it. Short version is that it’s new, not vintage, and from JC crazy Penney. It was a steal and an impulse buy that I don’t regret at all. It stays but will get better (thinner) legs one of these days. The color is blueish charcoal…maybe that is called steel? It works with the rock wall and with my dirty kids.

The coffee table stays and will be buried with me. I’m so happy we’re in each other’s lives.There’s this adorable little rocker that my mother in law scored at a garage sale and recovered for us in my favorite color when we had babies to rock (thank you Roxy!). And then all these tables. SO MANY TABLES. Will they all stay? Do I need to thin the herd? Then there’s this lamp. What high schooler would buy this whopper from an estate sale and carefully truck it home and tick off her mom whose all like, “ummm, are really going to put that thing in here“? Me. FOR FIVE DOLLARS. Balls and all. The score of my life. The worst decision ever was to not also buy its more petite lady friend (also five dollars), but money is tight when you toil part-time at Old Navy. Theoretically, this lamp should totally work in this room, but right now it is being dwarfed by the fireplace wall and tall ceiling. At almost 7′ tall, it really shines in lower ceiling situations. This room may be doing it a disservice and that ain’t cool. And this window…it’s placement is baffling to me and the wall is suspicious (it’s wood, not plaster, and I suspect it used to be a pretty stained wood wall that matched the wood built-in…then somebody painted it all), but I’m gonna deal with it like an adult. I had terribly wrong instinct with this built-in: to rip it out and build a more modern looking shelf and mantle deal that was really impressive in my head. Turns out, this shelf/cabinet thing rules. The cabinet is filled with board games and the shelves are filled with useless random junk that I love and don’t want to get rid of, but would have to otherwise if I didn’t have this handy display space for it. The walls will soon be bright white; the next step in the un-beiging of the house. I’m worried that the room doesn’t get enough light to facilitate bright white and it will still look dingy, but pressing onward. Maybe doing grasscloth wallpaper in here instead of in the dining room…you dig? You can see the fireplace rocks with the current paint and white paranoia swatch.The rest of the house is slowly being hardwood floored, but we’ve decided to keep carpet in this one room perpetually because it’s super cozy for movie nights by the fire. The current carpet is in great shape and good quality, though dated, since this was barely used as a formal living room previously. Fun 1961 fact: there is wall to wall yellow linoleum under this carpet…!The rail is original to the house clearly. So it should go back in, but I’m dragging my feet. It’s not the worst but I don’t LOVE it and see this potential for an insane room divider. Then again, if 60’s wrought iron rails are good enough for The Parker, they should be a-ok with me.