You know, life was getting boring. I mean, other than homeschooling, dance AND piano recitals, teeth falling out, and birthday parties every thirty days, our lives had just gotten SOOOO predictable.
What is a mom to do? Start a major remodeling project? SURE! Why not.
It started with deciding to finally convert our wood-burning fireplace to gas. We have used our fireplace about twice in the four+ years we’ve lived in this house, and I just finally HAD IT with this big unused thing taking up visual real estate in our living room. We went to the fireplace showroom and looked around, and then Aaron spoke the fatal words, “You know, why are we putting in a nice fireplace if the rest of that wall is junky? We should just knock out the whole wall and start over.”
Now, friends, some wives might be in seventh heaven if their husband gave a green light to this kind of project. But not me. Oh, don’t get me wrong. After I picked myself up off the floor (my Handy Husband usually takes about three years to make this kind of financial commitment to a non-urgent purchase) I was impressed with his cooperativeness.
I, however, am not the kind of woman who relishes these big scale projects. I can choose a paint color (witness our multi-hued home) or a carpet, but ask me about more than 3 features that need to coordinate – fireplace surround, cabinets, trim color – and it’s like you asked me about calculus. My mind draws a blank.
Thankfully I have lots of friends who are better at this sort of thing than I am, AND a little website called Houzz.com which is pretty awesome if you are looking for any house ideas. Search “stone fireplace dark built ins” and get about 3,000 results. I’ve been looking at photos of fireplaces until my eyeballs bleed.
And this project is morphing as we go. The path is a twisted one, so beware a simple thing like “convert wood fireplace to gas”. You will find yourself choosing a new surround, cabinets, paint colors for ceiling beams, and where to put new lighting. It’s enough to make me want to gag, folks.
So you know what we are working with, here is a photo of The Wall, after the very teensiest bit of demo…Aaron couldn’t resist.
We are for sure taking the wood off the wall behind the shelves – and as demonstrated on the left, there is textured drywall behind them! Yay! We are going to paint those sections the same color as the current walls, keeping in mind that later on we may do a slightly darker color if it all looks goofy.
Aaron is dead set on painting those ceiling beams white. Who am I to say no? He’s doing all the labor, and offered to repaint them dark if we didn’t like it. Decisions remain to made on the color of the lower cabinets and the fireplace surround… and whether to go with the fake logs inside the fireplace, or glass or stones. (I mean, everyone knows those logs are fake, so why persist with the illusion?!)
I can’t even picture what this room will look like with all the changes made. Can you?!
Let me also say that I realize how incredibly blessed we are to have this “problem”. If you want to spiritualize this project, you could say that we are trying to be good stewards of what God has given us, in improving the house’s resale value…even though that is probably 15 years down the road.
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Ever gotten in too deep with a redecorating/remodeling project? When did you come up for air?!
