Welcome to Our Home: The Family Room

Yippee!! Hooray!! Yahoo!! Months and months of hard work is finally coming to fruition!!

Because. Finally. After working with the simply amazing (not to mention, kind, fun, hard-working, and fabulous) Frances of Nest Furnishings (an AWESOME local shop here in Fort Mill), our family room is now re-vamped, re-decorated, and ready for entertaining. It only took us 13 months since moving in to begin making this house our home. Whew! 

I guess the best way for the reveal is a Before/After photo montage? Alrighty then. Here goes!

Before: 

The room was bland. We bought this sectional shortly after moving in because we wanted lots of seating for family and friends. We (bravely? stupidly?) decided to choose a white sectional because, even though we have young children, we really wanted something that would brighten the room, and we loved the way it looked. The way our house is designed, there is actually another seating/tv area on the other side of our kitchen, which we have designated the "kids area." This means that our kids spend very little time on our white sectional, which in turn means that, so far, it is still white. 

Anywho. The wall space over the sectional was intimidating. Big. Vast. Unfilled. We originally hung a white mirror over the sectional because, honestly, there was already a hook there when we moved in and we had the mirror laying around. We just threw it on the wall, knowing we would change it out one day when we could figure out what the heck to put there. 

We also had this HUGE blue shag rug that took over the room, making the room look small and boxed off. It had to go. Unfortunately, I had already removed it when I took the above photos. Just use your imagination: Envision a monstrous blue mass taking over the majority of the room. 

We had one piece of art on the wall that was meaningful to us that we definitely wanted to keep: a painting of the garden where my hub and I were married in 2004. However. The matte and frame made the piece look outdated (I also failed to take a before picture. But it was basically a very cheap, black frame with poorly cut, white cardboard matte-ing). It needed to be changed. As did most of the room. So.....

After:

I cannot begin to tell you how much my hub and I love this room now. It feels warm. It feels cozy. It feels like us. 

Because we like a lot of light, we had sconces installed over the sectional and used Edison bulbs to complete the look. We also added a beautiful piece of abstract art over the sectional and between the sconces.

We added bright pillows to the sectional to add a pop of color to the room.

We replaced our large-and-in-charge blue shag rug with a more understated, but beautiful, trellis rug in blue/tan. 

We added bunching tables to the room. This is one of my favorite additions. I love the rustic look of the wood as well as the functionality of the tables: when company comes, we can separate the tables into three separate pieces so that everyone has a spot to rest their drinks. 

We had two pieces of artwork we already owned reframed. Both are views of Hopeland Gardens in Aiken, South Carolina, where we were married. I cannot tell you how happy I was when I saw the beautiful framing of these pieces that are so special to us. The mattes and frames COMPLETELY transform the pieces (I wish I had "before" shots of them) and really make the room feel that much more special to us.

One thing in the room I did not change was the way I styled our built-ins after we first moved in. Although I do plan to update the photos soon, after we have some family pictures done later this month, these will otherwise remain the same. 

So. There you have it!! What do you think?

The Master bedroom and dining room are also in the midst of transformation. Posts on those rooms coming as soon as they, too, are complete. Whew. And let me just say, I cannot WAIT for this whole process to be O.V.E.R. Not only because these changes truly reflect us, our style, and make us finally feel home, but also because this whole process is, quite frankly, a pain in the *ss!!

I hope you like our new family room, and I hope to see many of y'all in the actual room, sitting right next to me, soon. :)