Home Renovation Before & After – The Living Room

How we turned a whole STATE of a home renovation into this beautiful building we’ve called home in under a year I don’t know (actually I do know, A LOT of hard work and A LOT of money). I can now truly say there are only small odd-jobs left to finish off around the place but everything large and scary is done. But every single room is complete bar a few tiny bits. I’m super excited to show you the huge difference we’ve made to this house in such a short space of time.

The living room was the first room to get work started on, I told Brad it needed to be done first so we had somewhere to sit and ‘live’. Especially since we had Theodore with us who was only 7 months old when we moved in. I and he would spend our days up in the master bedroom only coming down to make lunch and let me tell you it was DULL. You can see by the original photographs that the room had an extra little cupboard in the corner by the fireplace. This cupboard wasn’t even plastered it was just brick, perhaps an old storage cupboard for coal/wood. Anyway, we blocked that up and knocked it out and that made a huge size difference to the bathroom.

Every wall was taken back to brick and boarded again. Even the ceiling was ripped down and boarded. Every wall in this almost 100-year house is brand new, smooth and beautiful. Be gone the ugly woodchip which covered every inch of this property.

I’ve tried my best to take the after photographs at a similar angle to those of the ‘before’. Boy, do I wish I’d taken more before’s. To be honest, I didn’t really get chance, once moving day was over, work on the living room begun pretty much that next day.

I wasn’t too sure about what style we were going for in here. When we first finished this room back in October 2018 it had light grey walls and a dark grey feature wall. Which is why we went for a grey rug and grey curtains. I soon realised how much I really don’t like the colour grey. We painted it up ‘Coconut Juice’ by Valspar and I slowly added trinkets to make the place feel homely.

I’m currently on the lookout to swap the cushions over from green to creams/whites to try and make a boho kind of vibe.

So what do you think?! Do you think we’ve made a good job in this room? There are definitely things we’d have done differently if we had the chance to go all over again. I think we’d remove the whole fireplace surround and just put a lovely piece of natural oak beam up there instead.

I’d also have chosen lighter coloured wood flooring I think. Dark wood shows crumbs like MAD. I would love a carpeted living room but unfortunately this living room sort of doubles up as a hallway since the only way to get upstairs it to walk through it I would be worried about the state of the carpet. Next house I want a living room that’s shut off and cosy!

Overall I’m so proud of ourselves and how far we’ve come to make this ex 1930’s council house a beautiful home. I post tonnes of home content on my Instagram so make sure you’re following over there to see the rest of the rooms.

I’ll eventually get round to doing a post like this for each room so keep your eyes peeled for that. Next up, the kitchen which is built in the repaired extension!