Living Room, Progress

As I wrote here, we had a few things done before we moved into our home because we were 6 hours away and knew that we wouldn’t be able to get to them properly, with 2 kids and especially during a pandemic, which we are still being super cautious about.

We had some of the interior painted, which we have never had done before, we have always painted everything ourselves including the exterior of our homes…so it was crazy to actually have someone doing some of the painting. My hand is permanently injured from the amount of painting I have done over the years and I welcomed the help!

We also had some wallpaper put up and if you know me at all, you know how I love wallpaper. Every home we have ever lived in has had wallpaper in it, and me trying very hard not to give into my deepest desire to wallpaper the entire house, ha! To me, if your home is old, it should have wallpaper. Nothing brings out the charm of an old home like wallpaper does. So even though we have also hung a lot of wallpaper ourselves, we had help there too.

The last thing we had done was to have the floors refinished. That turned into somewhat of a disaster that I am still trying to accept which I will explain more later, but overall, we are happy with how they turned out. We wanted light floors because there is so much dark wood, and I am really glad we did, it was a massive improvement.

Every time we move I have a hard time accepting that what I have in my mind isn’t what I can afford. I start out with really big ideas and slowly narrow them down to what I can actually afford to do, and I think that is how I would describe “my style” it is based on what I can afford, not exactly what I had in mind. And that’s okay, I know I am not alone there.

Also I have really lost myself in motherhood and haven’t bought anything new in quite a long time, so moving to this house was a reminder of how some of things that I have kept over the years are really more of a reflection of who I was in my 20s/early 30s and they don’t necessarily reflect who I am anymore. Like these books for example, I don’t have the whole set, but I have a lot of them, and when I was in my 20s slowly buying them as a little treat, I loved that idea. Now that I am in my late 30s, I feel a little silly having them, but I am not about to buy all the classics again…so those are just going to be pieces of who I was…and as we live longer in this house, I’ll start to add in who I am in now.

I am also going to work at adding some more family warmth to our home. When we were selling our last house the couple that bought it came for a walk through, and the first thing one of them said was, “oh you must have already packed away your family pictures” and I was like…uh…what family pictures? haa! So I realized I really should have more pictures up, which isn’t something I grew up seeing much of, so I just never thought of having them myself, but I know my girls would love that.

Anyways, I digress. Here is the progress we’ve made on the living room so far. I absolutely love the wallpaper, it fits the space as though it was always supposed to be there. Wallis calls it our “snowflake” paper and that makes me smile because there should always be space in ones life for snow. We also put up new lights, with some new push button switches.