Major Project #1 : Living Room

We have always used this blog to chronicle our family happenings, but since we have bought a house with so many projects to do, it will also be a place for us to see the progress we have made on the house.  We hope to be able to do lots of before and afters so that we can look back and see how far we have come!  Our first really major project was tackling the living room.  I know it is hard to see in the pictures, but we have a lot of this hideous grasscloth wallpaper throughout the house.  To make things even worse, the wallpaper had been painted over.  We also are removing the popcorn texture from the ceilings room by room.  So, Sam worked on scraping, sanding and painting the ceilings and I removed the wallpaper, patched my gauges in the drywall, sanded and painted the walls.  I think the whole project took about 2 weeks working on it after the kids went to bed.  It wasn't that hard, just very time consuming and MESSY!

Here is the before picture, popcorn ceilings and grasscloth wallpaper.  Ignore the just having moved in mess!

Scraping the ceiling would not have been too bad if there weren't so many places where the ceiling had previously leaked.  These patched spots were the worst and took forever to get off and get sanded.

 Yup, there was a time where our living room looked like this.  The walls looked awful and the ceiling all bare.....luckily we kept on going and got a great end result!

 

 The AFTER!  Beautiful smooth ceilings, painted the walls a soft gray. No more wallpaper!!  Love it!  We still need more furniture and I am thinking of painting the wall in the back of the built-ins, just not sure what color yet, but it is a huge improvement from before!