From me and mine to you and yours, we hope you have a relaxing few days this Christmas season. Yes, this year is not going to be a normal Christmas, but if we do it right, next year will be so much better.
We’ve kept ourselves busy at home this holiday with lots of movies, toys, gaming and painting; I got a kick-start on painting our living room. It’s in no way complete as I’ve only been painting one section at a time. This is the only corner that’s been updated with burgundy.
However you choose to spend your time off, whether it is something that seems tedious like painting or not, I hope you get to do a few things you love and spend it with someone or something [pets included] close to you.
We’ve lived in our home for over a year and there’s a lot of it I haven’t shown just yet. I can’t really explain why. For a lot of areas in our home, I’m still figuring out what I’d like to change or update or keep as is. I guess I don’t want to share something until I can say, “But wait! I know what I want to do that will make it look better!” Or maybe it’s that we’ve lived in our home for over a year and I’ve only managed to update three rooms [and only documented one of them].
Case in point: our living room [not to be confused with our front room, which is like a secondary living room]. Our living room has very tall ceilings [maybe 11 feet?] and as you may have gathered from the title, is prominently brown. I’m not going to shame this shade of brown as it’s not a bad shade, but I don’t think it suits this room nor this setting so it’s time for a change. Now that I have some time off for the Christmas holidays and we’re heading into a second major lock down, I figured there was no better time than now to climb a ladder and annoy my family with the squeaky, rusted roller I refuse to throw out because it still technically works. Carpe diem.
Going counter-clockwise around the room, here is our main living space. And you would be correct, I did zero tidying before taking these photos. Nor did I warn my family:
There is a ton of storage in our living room and we don’t even use all of it. I love the built-ins. They’re not going anywhere. I’m not however in love with where our TV is and I would ideally like to move the TV or in time get a projector / screen situation so we could put the couch somewhere else.
I like the desk in the bay window, but there are some changes I’d like to make to it. I used to work here when I first started WFH in November 2019, but once covid hit and both Robert and Cora were home with me all day, all of us being in this room all day then in the evenings to relax really got to me, so I eventually moved upstairs.
I’m planning on painting this room – wait for it – burgundy. I know absolutely no one is surprised by that since the last two living rooms we’ve had have been burgundy. I have a type and I’m not ashamed by it.
“I know you don’t want to hear this but I have to say it: you can’t paint every room in our house burgundy”
– My ex-husband Robert
Robert was not surprised, but was worried because I mentioned I’d like the front hall to also be burgundy [with hand painted wallpaper] and felt the need to immediately veto the idea of an entirely burgundy house. Bless.
I should have alternatively called this post: “Robert’s Afternoon Nap on a Giant Bear in Eight Parts“.
Poor guy.
I really should have warned him. I doubt he’ll ever see this though.
I wanted to finish the tour of the before photos of our brown living room with this very annoying design choice the previous owner made when building the extension onto our house: neither the bay window nor the pendant light fixture [which doesn’t work] are centered to the view from the rest of the house from this hallway. It irks me and I sometimes want to get a sledge hammer to them in an attempt to move them more to the left.
*“Why the strangely specific blog title?”, I hear you ask. WordPress has a new feature where it encourages you to achieve a more unique blog post title by scoring you. My original post, “Our living room – before” got a score of 27/100. “Use less common and more descriptive words!”. It seems once you throw turd-brown in the title, I suddenly get 66/100. WordPress is a dirty girl.
A few weeks ago, while still in our current state of isolation, we went for a drive to get out of the house as we were beginning to feel more and more trapped in. While we were mid-way down a country road I saw a sweet little piece of furniture ruthlessly abandoned on the side of the road …
If you could hear the photo above it would sound like Robert grinding his teeth as he did a u-turn and popped the trunk so I could take yet another wayward piece of furniture home. To add insult to injury, the cabinet didn’t fit in the trunk so we had to secure it [safely] in the seat next to Cora in the back of the car. Robert was thrilled.
This was a piece I knew exactly how I wanted to update and needed to do little-to-no planning. I wanted to paint it with Fusion Mineral Paint‘s shade of Coal Black. No wonder this poor thing was abandoned as the finish of the wood wasn’t exactly complimentary to the velvet inside and the two clashed quite a bit [I thought. To each their own].
The first thing I did when I brought this little display cabinet home was wipe it down with antibacterial wipes because coronavirus. I removed all the little hinges holding the glass in place [you can see the black hinges in the photo above], carefully removed all the glass and got to work.
It was really straight forward project after that; using a small brush I smoothly applied 3 layers of Coal Black paint. I waited a minimum of 3 hours between coats of paint to ensure each coat was dry, but it will be a few more days before the paint is cured [want to know the difference between dry and cured? Fusion Mineral Paint has a great post all about it here].
This was such a straight forward project and thanks to the incredible finish with Fusion Paint, the completed look is so perfect. I was debating sanding the edges of the display case after applying the paint [to give a similar distressed look like our Coal Black dining room hutch], but I decided against it since the “wood” finish / stain was such a strange colour, it is what would come through. I think that shade needs to stay under 3 coats of paint.
DISCLOSURE - while this post is not sponsored, I did receive this paint free of charge from Fusion Mineral Paint in exchange for a blog post. I only work with brands that I like and of course, think you will too. Thank you for supporting the companies that support The Interior DIYer.
