Before & After: Living Room (and a few additions to the dining room)

Living Room Before (with previous owner's furniture)...

Before, the living room ceiling, walls, and trim were painted a light celery green, which probably does not read as well in the above photograph. The carpet was dingy and in need of updating, and the vertical blinds just had to go. (Besides, we wanted to take more advantage of having floor-to-ceiling windows.) We liked the long narrow bricks in the fireplace (very mid century), but they were too jarring for a clean modern look.

Living room after...

First, we painted the ceiling and three of the walls Rhinestone white. The fourth wall we painted a stony blue. For the floors, we stayed within our meager budget and used Mannington laminate snap-in planks. The fireplace got a coat of super duty primer before a few coats of Rhinestone white. The mirror above the fireplace we got for a steal at a now-out-of-business boutique shop in downtown Springfield, MO. It's made of bamboo veneer. Originally, it was a much lighter color and full of scratches (thus, the steal for the price). All it took was some sanding and a very thick coat of mahogany gel stain and presto. A few other highlights include the floating orange bar (made from half of a dropleaf table acquired from dumpster diving in Boston--the "drop" in the dropleaf is soon to be added), the tripod lamp in the back corner (made from a surveyor's stand I got from another dumpster search in Boston), and the Broyhill Brasilia credenza (circa 1963) we bought from The Future Antique in St. Louis. We also cannot go without mentioning how thrilled we have been with our leather sectional, a great find from Macy's, of all places. (We'll try to get a better picture of it for another post, but for now, this link will have to suffice.)
Another important piece in our living room is the completed (at last) 4'x6' MIO tile project I mentioned in a previous post. I didn't want to glue them to the wall (as the manufacturer suggests for permanent installation). I knew we would end up ruining the tiles and the wall in the process (i.e., trying to adjust crooked tiles or wanting to try the placement in another part of the room). Instead, I ended up building a framed canvas from a sheet of thin MDF and routered 2x4s, painted it the same color as the tiles (Rhinestone white, again), attached the tiles with wood glue, and called it a (very long) day. In the end we couldn't be happier with the result. And, admittedly, we've been leaving those floor-to-ceiling windows open to let the occasional pedestrian view the final result. Oh vanity, I know, but when you put this much work into a project...

Dining room before (with previous owner's furniture)...
Dining room after...Ok, so we've shown the dining room before and after in a previous post; however, we finally finished the wall once hidden in the cave created by the awkward placement of the shelving unit. After we removed the shelving unit and placed it against the opposite wall, we placed our bench under a very simple coat rack (8 Ikea hooks on 4 mahogany stained slats of wood). The orange floating bar I mentioned earlier is a little more noticeable in this picture. We still need to get a bar stool to go under it, but that will have to come later.

So now that the living and dining rooms (or perhaps we should just refer to them as a great room) are "done" (for now), what's our style? At first, we were headstrong about mid-century modern, but our budget necessitated the use of a lot of furniture we already had. The style of the green and orange leather chairs, cow skin rug (not pictured), dark circular mirror, and organic touches (e.g., twigs near fireplace) almost give this room a colonial African modern look. (Who would have thunk it?) Granted, the label of this style does not seem appropriate for our post-colonial world, but what would you call it? It's not totally modern. For one, the materials and palate are too warm. It has some mid-century elements, but I wouldn't go as far as to call that the style. "Eclectic" is always an option, but that word seems overused in interior design to mean anything (or sometimes just a nice way to say "no style"). Oh well, this is trivial, I realize. At the very least, this "style" conundrum has prompted us to consider some new options for our walls. I think we'll try to do some interesting effects in Photoshop (e.g., heavy color saturation or posterizing) to my great grandparents' slides from a trip to Africa (circa 1960).