Living Room (and other rooms) Make-Over

We are in the middle of a big project that involves redoing multiple rooms simultaneously.

 I already posted about ripping the carpet out in the empty room so it could become the home office (at least until we have children and it becomes a nursery). I set a little desk back up in there for now because Miran needs privacy sometimes when he works from home and is on a conference call. Because we only want to rent a floor sander once, I've also ripped up the carpet in the guest room so that we can refinish that hardwood floor as well. The guest room will become the bird room when Milada arrives in August, so we need carpet out of there. In both rooms the floor is in decent shape, but has a thin spray of white paint and a couple of gouges.

Emptying those two rooms of their contents, as well as emptying the living room for its make over has meant that our bedroom and the dining room have become storage areas. Hopefully we'll only have to live like this for a couple of weeks. My legs are already bruised from bumping into things in the night in the bedroom.

In the living room itself, So here is the before picture of the office ...

And here is the design plan for it to actually become a living room. We tried out the couches last week at Macy's and I ordered them yesterday because they were on memorial day super sale. The bookcases we bought from IKEA, but we saved some money and didn't buy the doors (as shown on the left side). So its more the open shelves like on the right side.

So the first step was getting everything out of the room and selling the two big black bookcases. I also sold the low bookcase and the mission clock from the guest room. Then I painted the walls the same silver gray as our bedroom. It barely shows in this photo, but on the right side over Miran's desk you can see that I only painted 3/4ths of the room - I didn't paint behind our desks yet, which haven't moved yet, because the floor upstairs isn't done.

After the walls were painted, I assembled the bookcases with a little help from Miran to secure the tops to the wall and get the corner ones positioned right. I painted the inside back green. I think it looks nice and a little fancier because these bookcases are kind of cheap. I'm pretty excited about how they turned out and really like how they wrap around the corner. There is more shelf space now than before - so I have room for expansion as well as for some decorative objects on the shelves.

Dad's going to build a window seat chest for the space between the bookcases - and here is a shot of me testing the space out during a break from putting the books on the shelves.

So now we wait for the couches and window seat to be delivered in a few weeks. In the meantime I'm going to look for a cheap white rug, order the roller shades, and get the lighting from IKEA.

And now we need to turn our attention to the floors upstairs so we can get our desks out of here before the couches arrive!