$350 family room update (painted fireplace, board and batten walls, pallet light, etc!)

With the kitchen finished, we've knocked out one of our bigger house projects. That being said, we are constantly working on other little projects around the house. It's been about 6 months since we moved in, but I am finally confident in saying that we are (pretty much) finished our second room - the family room.



Our family room was an addition to the original house, which was added probably about 30 years ago. It's a nice big room, with doors to our porch and a fireplace (which shares a chimney with an outdoor fireplace - one of the best features of this house!)

When we first moved in, our family room looked like this:

It was perfectly nice, but just not us.

The first thing I did, maybe a day or two after we got the keys, was to paint the fireplace white and the walls a purpley grey. At this point, I had no idea where my camera was, so I only took a couple of quick, terribly lit photos of what I was doing.

I was pleasantly surprised to find these two beautiful air return vents that had previously been hidden behind old photos!I couldn't cover these up again, and luckily, I had a mirror that fit perfectly between them. 

Here's a photo during the painting process. We had a LOT of cream to get rid of (all baseboards, vents, etc.) and with the fireplace and walls, it was a huge job. Luckily, I had a friend to help me out (you can see her shadow on the right!)

I'm not sure if you've ever painted brick before but there was absolutely no trick to it - I used cheap white paint and a regular brush and it's held up perfectly.

Here's a photo from Christmas comparing the two - at this point, I had painted the walls and fireplace, but hadn't yet gotten to that gold colored insert.

By February, I was getting ready to call this room finished - we had sprayed the gold insert black, added a homemade coffee table, and done just about everything I could think of (with the exception of fixing the lighting, which I'll get to in a bit.)

One day, though, I was sitting watching TV and staring at the blank walls when I decided... I should do more board and batten. I had just had great success with adding it in my front hallway, and I was sure that it would look amazing in my living room.

Once I get an idea, it's hard for me to sit on it. Within a few hours, I had gone to Home Depot and purchased all of the wood I needed to board-and-batten up the entire family room.

(I'm going to say that there's really no excuse for the poor quality of these pictures, except that I think my camera was at work that weekend.)

Once I had board-and-battened the entire room, we finally decided to address the lighting issue. The biggest issue is that there wasn't any. When we moved into the house, there was a weird, completely off centered medallion on the ceiling. It may look somewhat centered in this photo, but believe me, that's a trick of the wide angle lens.

In a pinch, my husband wired a bulb from the medallion, so that we could have some semblance of light. This was supposed to be a temporary fix, but it ended up being our main source of light in the family room for almost 5 months. The reason for that wasn't laziness (because if nothing else, Joel and I are always up for a project.) It was more just that we couldn't figure out what to do. The ceilings are popcorned, and underneath the medallion was not popcorned. This means that when we removed the medallion, there would be a huge circle of non-popcorned ceiling. The worst part is that it wasn't centered, so we couldn't put something over it to cover it up.

Anyway, Joel finally came up with an idea for a 5 foot by 5 foot box that would cover the ceiling and center out the lighting. He covered the box with pallet wood in a herringbone style and added 5 potlights, giving us gloooorious light!

Here's a picture from the hanging up phase - you can see here how completely off centered the light was.

(If anyone is interested in the directions for how to build this light fixture, please let me know and I can post them.)

With the lighting coming together, I realized I was uninspired by the current purpley-grey color I had painted the room. As my final piece, I repainted the walls, using a Sherwin Williams color that had been color matched to Martha Stewart's Plumage.

First off, here's a couple of photos where you can see the light Joel made:

And now, the finished room!

This room really didn't cost too much to update. Among the things we did:

• painting the fireplace ($10 for a 5 gallon "mistint" of off white - the fireplace required maybe 1% of the amount of paint!)
• painting the room grey (another $10 5 gallon mistint)
• board and batten ($60 for supplies)
• pallet light (our biggest expense - $200 including the LED lights)
• blue paint ($1!! The paint store near me was clearing out cans of white for a buck a piece, which they will tint at any time for me.. I bought all 24 cans.)
• white paint for the board and batten (another $1 score)
• plus I'd factor in another $50 or so for all of the painting supplies, wood filler, etc. that was used along the way

So in total, under $350 for all of the updates we made. That's not including furniture (all of which we either owned already or made, or found second hand) and all of the decorations (as those aren't room specific, and will travel with us if and when we move.) I am, as always, very pleased!

What do you guys think - was the darker color a good choice? Or did you prefer the light?

Have you ever had a difficult design challenge (such as an off centered light) that you've had to overcome?

$70 front entry makeover - DIY Board and batten!

 This weekend I did one of my favorite room makeovers ever. Surprisingly, it was also the least expensive, and the only one I've ever done without Joel's help. 

Our front hallway was seriously lacking in the beauty department. For whatever reason, the previous owners decided that painting it avocado green and slapping a weird, sideways rail around the room was acceptable. Even more confusing, Joel and I lived with the room like this for almost five months before I did anything about it.

Joel was tied up all weekend working on our hardwood herringbone kitchen floors (which are looking killer, by the way) so I wanted to find something I could do on my own to help beautify our house.

I've seen tutorials all over the internet for DIY board and batten, and finally decided that I would give it a try. It ended up being even easier than I could have imagined. I feel silly for living with this hideous vegetable colored mess of an entryway for so long.

I began working on my entryway on Friday (which I had off from work.) The first thing I did was  prime the entire room white. I even painted the wood baseboards and molding, which was so boring but needed to be done so badly.

Once that was finished, I began to figure out my room. I knew that I was going to place my batten strips 16 inches apart, because that's how far apart the studs in the room are (this actually ended up not mattering anyway, which you'll see later.) I decided to place my top rail 3 feet up from my baseboards, which was really an arbitrary height that just seemed to work in the space.

I made a sketch of my space, and figured out how many battens I would need (13, at about $1.50 each) and how many feet of wood I would need for the top rail (about 20 feet of 1x3 wood, so I needed 3 pieces of 1x3x8 pine at $1.27 a piece.) The wood itself cost me about $30. I also bought some paint (a mistint at $10) a new rug for the door, and some hooks.

When I got home, I began to space my battens apart on the wall. I would tape them up using painters tape, then use a level to make sure they were straight (since the painters tape wasn't too tight, I could slide them around to make them level.)

To make the job easier on myself, I had a scrap of 1x3 cut to 16 inches, which I used to space my batten evenly. 

 Once I had a walls worth of battens placed, I used a nail gun to secure them in place.

Once the batten was nailed in, I was able to slide the rail in place. Since the batten was all cut to the same length, the rail was level to begin with. I used my nail gun to secure the rail.

To secure the rail, I used a drill to add screws every time there was a stud. Since I had initially spaced my batten 16" apart, this should have been easy, but it turns out I still needed to use a stud finder to find some of the studs. I guess things like electrical switches, compounded by the fact that this house is weird and old, made the studs not totally evenly spaced.

Once the screws were in, it was time to sit back and adore my wall. 

It took about an hour to put the board and batten up around the whole room. It went so quickly. Once I was done with the wood, I used wood filler to cover up the holes from my screws, and used caulking to fill in any cracks between the walls and my rail.

 The next day, I began painting. I did the top part of my walls first, because I figured if I dripped anything, it would be easy to cover with the white.

Next, I painted the board and batten white, and that really changed the entire room. I added some hooks, an old chair I made over a while ago, and some homemade art work.

I'm in love!

Our floors are really coming along. I'll hopefully be posting about them this week!