Remodeling The Living Room

I am little behind in my blogging, to say the least...I wrote a post back at the beginning of January about us remodeling our living room. Well, the remodel has been finished for weeks now! In fact, we were able to remodel the room in about 5 days, with the help of my husband's family. So I want to shout out a big "THANK YOU" to his family for helping us out! Removing wallpaper goes much faster with five people peeling it off the walls.

We were lucky enough to find out that the wallpaper was actually primed behind! It was our first room in the house that didn't have wallpaper directly on the drywall! With the help of some hot water in a spray bottle and a steamer we were able to remove all of the wallpaper with little patching.

Here was the ugly wallpaper before:

After the wallpaper was gone, we painted three of the walls a beige color that matched our formal dining room. I wanted a little color in the room, so on the south wall we painted it red, Valspar's Royal Garnet to be exact. It looked so pretty with my pictures I had on the wall. In addition to the painting, we resurfaced all of the wood in the room (which was a ton!) and changed out the light fixture to something not so dated. Also, I got a little crafty and decided to make some shams for above the shades and cover my lampshades in a red material that matched the garnet wall.

Here was the living room before:
Here is the living room after:

A view of the bar before:
Here is a view of the room looking at the built in bar. Notice the new light fixture. We decided to go with something pretty plain because we really want the focal point of the room to be the large windows and red wall.
A before view of the room, as if walking in from the main hallway:

And the after view complete with matching lampshades and shams for the windows:

The before view of the floor to ceiling windows that look over the lake.

And the after:

Well that's it for the new living room! The red wall is by far my favorite part of the room. I think it gives the room a nice vibrant look and the red is great contrast to the green pines in the backyard. My husband and I keep asking ourselves why we waited so long to redo this room. It is such a nice feeling now to be surrounded with the beautiful view outside through the windows and beautiful walls inside. It is truly amazing what a little paint can do to a room!

~Beth