home tour: living room and dining room.

I suppose if I plan to write a blog about my home projects, I should probably show you what my home looks like.  Over the next week (if I keep my act together), I'll give you a full tour.  One thing to note - we have done almost no interior work to the house.  Mostly because there is nothing that needed to be done.  Sure, there are things we want to do, but we're taking our time and getting to that when it works for our schedule and budget.  The bulk of the work we did last year was on the exterior and landscaping of the house which I'll get to showing you once the weather gets nicer.

I'm starting off with our living room and dining room area, which is one large open space.  This is definitely where we spend the bulk of our time.

Eventually we hope to pull up the carpets to reveal the concrete slab below.  We'll either seal it, skim coat it, or paint it gray and use area rugs to warm up the floors.  Our couch was inherited from Rich's grandmother in all its pink velour glory.  It has served us well, but has seen better days, and will probably be replaced when we pull up the carpet.  White carpets and velour couches are hard to keep clean with three animals running around the house.

We have a wall of brick in the living room that houses our wood stove.  We used this as our primary heat source this winter since oil is freaking expensive.  The brick also runs throughout the main hallway in our house that connects the main living space with the bedroom area.

Our coffee table was inherited from Rich's great-grandmother.  I did a quick touch-up on the wood to spruce it up about a year ago.  However, Rich's french press has done some damage and it needs to be refinished.  At the same time, we're not sure if it will stay once we start working on the room.

The built-in bookshelf is pretty much the only interior project we've completed here.  When we first moved in, it was painted a dark maroon.  I had a week off between jobs and immediately addressed that.  The color came out slightly more blue than I wanted, but it does the trick.  Once the carpets get pulled up, this will probably get repainted so it doesn't blend in with the concrete floors as much.

The dining room is off to the side of the bookshelf.  As soon as we were under contract on the house, I jumped on craigslist to look for dining room chairs with the plan of building a dining room table down the line.  Coming from an apartment, I was incredibly excited to finally have a dining space.  I found the 6 chairs for $100.  I love them, but they desperately need to be reupholstered.  The dining room table was a generous gift from my parents.  It was the first piece of real furniture they purchased for their home years ago.  They decided to pass it along since the style fit better in our house and my dad was interested in building a new table for their house.  I love the table and the space it provides us to entertain.

Off to the left, there is a sliding door that leads out to our screened-in porch.