Living in Progress

The living room and the nursery were the last rooms in the house that we finished. The living room probably had the worst floor issues of any of our rooms because some of the joists had pulled away from the sill and were rotting. Of course Dave was ready (realized it was inevitable) to tackle the project!

 

Dave's parents were nice enough to come down from NC to visit so that Dave's dad could help him with the room:

Here's me very pregnant and bloated:

In the photo above you can see where we put in a new header over the opening for the French doors in order to install pocket doors. You can also see where the old stove connected to the wall over the fireplace and the lack of studs surrounding it. We had to get a little creative when we wanted to mount our tv up there. I'll address that in the next post. 

 Above is the dining room on the other side of the French door opening. While working on rooms in the house we would normally seal off the other rooms with plastic in hopes of cutting down on dust and cold/hot air from the gaping holes in the floors/ceilings.

When Dave put up the header for the doorway he of course braced the ceiling with a makeshift wall of studs:

Enter Keith and Barry who we owe big time for helping hang drywall:

Dave also installed recessed lighting. The old stove connection in the wall had been plastered over and it was too thick to hang drywall over. We simply had our drywall finisher mud the area and smooth it in with the rest of the wall.

Originally we tried a color that our friends had left over from their house but we felt it was a little too Mesa for our home. It especially looked that way around the arches so we decided to go with a light khaki color which we mixed from samples and had color matched at Sherwin Williams.

Although we had planned to have our trim guy come just before we thought our daughter would be born, she came a little a little early so we waited until she was a few weeks old. He did all of the trim, wainscoting, and later the fireplace. We had planned to do all of that ourselves but found it necessary to hire it out since we had a new baby to figure out (way more complicated and intimidating than remodeling).