A Summer of Rearranging and Painting

After a year in our home, we painted the basement and laundry room. Last summer we painted the kitchen, dining room, living room, one bathroom and a guest room. This year, we finished up EVERYTHING by painting the upstairs stairs and hallway, the office, 3 bedrooms and two bathrooms. So considering that that all just got finished, we've spent a month of our summer on the road, I'm 38 weeks pregnant, have 3 kids 4 and under, and my time is currently being spent canning, dehydrating and pureeing, and inventorying 11 boxes of kid clothes, shoes and coats, I didn't think it was necessary to clean up every room for the pictures. Instead, you get a reality of my life. The rooms are not fully decorated, but they are painted, and with that, they are free from hundreds of pinholes in a 3 inch square, knife marks, scars from a dart board, and endless fist-size and head-size holes. Hooray! And I didn't take before pictures, but here are the ones from when we moved into our house.

Laundry room before

Laundry room after:

Greek! I just need to get a calendar of Greece to add some pictures to the walls.

I saw this cool idea on Etsy selling for $40, and I loved it. But I found this saloon door in a trash pile and used the hooks from the previous coat rack, so my cost was $0!

Shad added a shelf for me.

Main floor bathroom before

Bathroom last year after being painted:

And now after some decorating work:

Dining room before

Dining room after:

I think I wrote about this last year--it took us a full week to paint this. We worked each night after the kids went to bed and each of the 3 colors needed 2 coats. Exhausting, but so worth it!

One thing I've learned from decorating cakes (and with some idea help from Pinterest) is to cover unsightly blemishes with decoration. So...on this wall, the HOME decor plate is covering the doorbell chime, and the bottom picture is covering the thermostat.

Shad built a box to hinge this picture frame onto.

 Office before:
(Also, imagine this with wall to wall bookshelves)

Office after:

It's half and half grey and turquoise, with two solid walls and two diagonal walls as shown below.

The office is one of my rearranged rooms. We moved 3 bookshelves to the basement so that the room could be repurposed as my creative room. It's now got my sewing desk so that I don't have to share a room with babies, or clean up a project when guests come.

Living room before

Living room after:

(But these are the pictures I took last year. It's totally not clean like this right now!)

Basement before

Basement after:
(We scraped the popcorn ceiling off so we could paint it gray)

We rearranged from having the couches and tv at the back and empty spaces in the front, to having the tv space in the front with the couch creating a barrier for the schoolroom at the back.

Our schoolroom! Complete with puzzles, books and dress-up clothes on the floor...and a popcorn table:)

 Upstairs hallway before

After:

(Okay, so this is the stairwell and not the hallway, but it's one and the same)

Master bath before

After:

(I had a really hard time getting the color to show right on the camera. This is as close as I got. It's an ocean teal.)

Kids' bedroom before. 

To give an idea of how bad these walls were, observe the star and cloud decorations in the picture below. All those stars are covering holes or spots that were unwashable. It was the very first room I decorated in our house.

Tom and Katie each picked a color. I'm sure you can guess who picked which ones.

The former sewing room

After:

Kids' bathroom before:

After:

Guest room before:

After:

Master bedroom before: 

That corner is where the air conditioner drains (not supposed to) and so the ceiling was falling in.

After:

 

We didn't intend to do red and black, but we didn't buy our red paint knowing how much red is needed to get a solid wall. We had to buy black to cover where the red would be lacking. We love how it turned out! I'll post again in a few months when I have these rooms more decorated and put together, but for now this suffices.