Before & After: Living Room

It's about time I posted some more before & afters from my home. If you remember the kitchen before & after, you'll recall that we knocked out a wall in between the living room and kitchen, or rather, widened the doorway a whole lot. That was the best thing we ever did... neither space is very large, and that wall made it feel so small and tight.

Here's the before photos...

 As you can see above, there's just a regular doorway into the kitchen, not very open and airy by any means.  We also had some gross carpeting (both visually and actually, there were stains all over it), crooked chair rail molding, along with plenty of dingy trim and paint.

Ready for an improvement? Here you go!

 A pretty big change, huh? The only thing that wasn't replaced was the windows. By doing almost all the work ourselves, we kept our budget pretty low. The chair rail molding looked awkward, so we removed it (a lot of the drywall came with it, so the walls had to be re-mudded).We installed wood flooring, new lighting, and new paint, of course. Add in some light, neutral furnishings with some colorful art, and ta-da, awesome new space.

You can see what a huge difference removing the wall made... I love how open it is to the kitchen now, and I use that peninsula constantly. The room is fairly narrow, so my furniture layout was pretty limited, but I'm very happy with the set-up. I tried to inject character into the room wherever I could, the Exepdit display area and the bookshelf corner accomplish just that.

If you want to view the coordinating kitchen before and after, click here, or see all posts in the before and after category.