When people came over, I'm sure it looked a little crazy with all of the paint smudges everywhere!
And then once you got past the indecisive paint swatch area, you were presented with a stairway that looked like this:
I was afraid to touch it myself for fear of catching something. There were scratches, crayon markings (that I'm almost positive were NOT my kids' artwork, but I could be wrong), gouges from someone probably moving furniture.
I'll spare you a photo of the stairway carpet. It was bad. BAD. Like, don't let your baby/toddler crawl on that nasty carpet BAD.
And the front room, complete with lovely "chandelier" was about as inviting as ... well, this. You can see it. Plain just like the rest of the house when we bought it.
I had seen this picture on Pinterest. I would add a credit, but I can't remember where it's from (sorry). I thought, "We have pillars like that!" I wanted to re-create this so badly, but every purple-y brown color that I picked to match just doesn't look right to me. Not in our space.
So we went with this gray. It blends well with the green color right next door in the living room, and we took it all the way up the stairs to the playroom, where it looks fine with that bright blue as well.
Plus, it looked great in a paint sample we got from Lowe's that included this nice brown earth tone we chose for the front room.
Here was my inspiration for the front room:
We have a really nice wine cabinet in the front room that is dark cherry with green ivy vines on it. I want to keep it in there and keep a earthy vibe in the room. Since I couldn't decide on a purple for the walls, I decided to keep the purple as an accent color instead. The gray from the entryway is in this decoration, the brown of the front room walls, the green of our wine cabinet, and the purple will come in with the curtains and other furnishings.
We eventually want to replace all of the carpets on the main floor with dark hard wood flooring, so every decision we make about paint and decor is with that future goal in mind. I wonder when we'll ever have the money to do that, unless we go one room at a time, but hey ...
We found a nice new light fixture to replace the gold and plastic one (finally!). It was less than $100 on sale, and it matches the curtain rods I chose.
I put up some $5 white sheer curtains just before the holidays, and I plan to sew custom rod pocket panels to go around and over top of them soon.
Oh, and FYI, painting the pillars was a CHORE. Not fun. At all. Seriously. Sucked. And took forever. But whatever ... they look nice.
There's not much else going on in this front room right now because of other priorities. I need to be able to walk into my sewing room before I can sew the curtains. We are stalking Goodwill and other thrift stores for furnishings that we can re-furbish or that are already perfect for this space, but until then, it just has a facelift from the filthy off-white barren-ness to this more elegant color and mood.
Adding to the sheer amount of work that this house is for us (read: ME, because I'm the resident painter!), every interior door has to be painted white to match the baseboards and to otherwise look clean.
In the above picture, the door on the left has not been painted white, but the white one just got a first coat.
In the picture below, the door on the left has been painted two coats of white, but the one on the right, my bedroom door, is still as it was. And it's probably the filthiest door I've seen in this entire house, so I'm really glad it's painted now, even if it will be a few months before my bedroom itself sees a coat of paint!
And that is all we have done to the front room and entry way for now!
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