a new room

I wanted to share the photos from our new playroom/family room. It's been finished for a few weeks now, but we've been adding new touches here and there... I'm so happy with how it's turned out. The biggest improvement is that we had oak floors installed. They're so beautiful. I don't want to cover them up with a rug... I love them so much.

We also had some of the odder "fixtures" removed, like the poorly built cabinets that didn't open and close properly and were really very ugly, and not useful, because they were so deep. We kept the shelves that came with the room but added one more shelf on each side. I'd still like to add a bottom shelf to each side that would rest on the floor, but for now this will do.

For whatever reasons, this room doesn't have heating vents that connect to rest of the house, instead there was a creepy old vent in the floor for an electric heater. This seemed especially dangerous with small children so we never turned it on. There are also baseboard heaters along the walls, that we don't use either. We had the floor heater removed, but kept the baseboard heaters, just in case. But for the last year I've disguised and protected that floor vent by keeping it covered in rugs. It's been a sore spot for me, especially frustrating when small toys would fall through the slots.

Here are a few before photos, taken when the previous owners still lived here: 

The corner shelf near the bathroom door had three shelves that jutted out into the room for an ancient stereo system... not something that we need now, so I had those shelves cut down to be flush with the walls. It looks so much nicer and we can actually use them now, before they ended up being jumbled junk shelves that were hard to reach.

My husband's parents generously gave us their leather couch and recliner. At first, I wasn't sure about having such "big" furniture in this small room, but after a few nights of watching Downton Abbey in that big, comfortable recliner, I realized that they were perfect. It's nice to have "grown up" furniture. I can see why people like it.

I bought a side table carved from mango wood from West Elm to go on one side of the couch. And, I'm using two of my mother's small carved wooden tables from India on the other side.

I've decorated the walls with some of my paintings, a print by Australian artist, Tiel Seivl-Keevers and a vintage postcard that I found at a flea market in Paris.

The bathroom door and the closet door really dominate one side of the room, I've been trying to figure out a way to break up that space. At the moment, I'm experimenting with two branches spray painted silver... I think they will do for now. Maybe I'll have a rotating display of natural objects.

Oh! And finally for the television stand, my husband painted an old wash stand that belonged to my mother. She had collected it years ago, and never finished stripping the old paint off it, so it's been sitting in basements across the country for decades. I chose a paint called Vintage Map by Martha Stewart. It came out much paler than I imagined and not quite a vintage map look, but I'm still pretty happy with it. I bought some sparkly glass knobs from Anthropologie. I have a reproduction of a map of Paris to hang above the television, but I am currently on a mission to find a frame that's large enough to hold it.

After living here a year and a half, it's so satisfying to finally start making this house ours. Yay!

Comments

[Alexis]

I love the huge leather couches next to the painted brick. A very lovely room indeed.

[Cyndi]

Thank you, Alexis!