Scraplog

Club House Living Room Part 1

Hey everybody, remember me? This has been my longest blog break yet! And recently I have had some very loyal fans asking me to blog again so I figured I could at least continue working on the tour of our tiny house :)

After having lived here for almost a year now, we can both say that we love living small. Will we live in a house this small for the rest of our lives? Probably not, but at this point it’s exactly what we needed and wanted and we are so happy to be here. So without further ado, here is the progress we have made on one of our favorite rooms, the living room…

As you can see, the living room is situated at the front of the house and it also functions as a hallway and entryway and it is open to the dining room. It is the largest room in the house but still small by any US standard. But this room is awesome because it is flooded with light! A definite win in my book.

We didn’t really change much in this room. A bit of paint and a good cleaning and it was ready to go. But because you can’t have a good after without the before, here is a photo of the house before we even bought it:

Now that I’m looking at these photos a year later, I’m so happy with the way it turned out. I’m really glad we chose to paint everything white because it feels so fresh and bright. Plus, it was pretty dirty, a bit of paint makes everything better.

Before we moved in, we wanted to work on the kitchen and bathroom but we didn’t want to live there while we were doing the work and we had to move out of our old house. So we packed up and shoved all of our stuff into the bedrooms and stayed at my parent’s house while we got busy. Because there were so many things going on at once, Jason kept saying we lived in the projects :)

Here is the living room in the midst of all the fun. It was basically a set up and storage area. We kept most of our tools in here, and an oven :) There is also a dishwasher in there somewhere. Needless to say, it was a disaster! And it was around all of this stuff that I painted the room. Not the most fun painting experience but it worked out okay.

Once we had made enough progress with the other rooms and we were able to live in the Club house, we put the basic amount of furniture in the living room and then continued to use it for other purposes… like a space for painting the interior doors. And that box that is functioning as a coffee table? That’s our kitchen sink :)

The living room also posed as a makeshift kitchen. That is all we needed to survive, a toaster oven and a microwave :) I think our coffee maker was somewhere on the floor at this point as well which is definitely necessary for survival. This room also served as a makeshift craft room while I did some sewing projects. I used two sawhorses and an old door for a sewing table. We were very creative! This space got shuffled around so many times in this remodel process. It functioned as many different spaces, sometimes at the same time.

This room originally had a ceiling fan. It was ugly and I knew it wouldn’t be staying so I brought the light fixture from our old dining room with us. I still really loved it and so we took it down before we put our house on the market and saved it for this room. Because it is a large drum shade, Jason hung it pretty quickly so we wouldn’t damage it. What a good sport!

We also did a little bit of work to the fireplace. First, I painted the brick white. What a difference! We also got a gas log insert. We could tell that there had been one previously and so when the plumber put in the new gas line to the range, we had him put in a gas line and insert in the fireplace as well. We had so many things going on that this wasn’t a top priority for us but now that we have it, we are so glad we went ahead and did it. We used it all winter and I’m super excited for some cool weather so I can turn it on again this fall!

While I was very excited about the insert, I wasn’t excited about the yellow pipe. Really, yellow? Don’t they make black pipes?!

So I did what any girl would do and I carefully taped everything off, and sprainted it! I used high heat spray paint and I asked the nice man from the gas company if it was okay first :) And no worries, the pilot light was not on at this point and the gas was turned off. Safety first :)

Whew! Much better! Now it’s not even really noticeable.

And our fireplace gets the job done and it surprisingly puts out a lot of heat! A funny little story, when the man from the gas company was there, he told us that if we would replace the light fixture with a ceiling fan, it would really move the air around and heat the whole house. We had just switched out the old ceiling fan to the new light fixture the day before. Oh the irony!

When we moved, we decided to get rid of all of our televisions. Since we have been married, we have never had cable anyway and the only t.v. we ever watch at home is on the internet. The only thing we really used them for is for movies. So, in an effort at downsizing, we ditched the t.v.’s. Instead, we have a large iMac in the living room and if we want to watch a movie, it’s plenty big for that.

While I love having the computer in the living room, it makes hanging artwork on that wall difficult. And it’s the only wall that there is room for artwork. It really was a no-brainer. The gallery wall had to come back.

At this point, I started hanging pictures in an effort to empty boxes. I emptied 4 boxes by the time I got all of my frames hung (this photo is mid progress). And since then I have added more. The goal is to cover the wall and I am getting close!

So that about wraps it up for today! Either tomorrow or Wednesday I will show the reveal of the living room. You won’t want to miss it! Okay, maybe it’s not that exciting but, you know, you can check back if you want to :)