Round and Round...

Isn't it funny how once you have been in your house for awhile you start changing rooms that you already changed like 4 times before?  We have one particular room like that in our house.  It started as the original "man cave", complete with dark wood paneling.  It looked like this:

Then we slowly started to make progress and made the fireplace a little more "homey" feeling by adding a mantle and taking down the 70s looking mirror in December of 2009.

Right around the corner in January of 2010, I convinced Jimmy to let me paint the fireplace and replace the gold fireplace cover.  It did make quite the difference, don't you think??

Painted with old cover

Painted with the new "updated" cover

FINALLY in August of 2010, the inevitable happened.  Jimmy caved in and let me paint the wood paneling.  Oh my gosh.  I was absolutely thrilled.  And I'm pretty sure that our 1970s wood paneling man cave/family room was upgraded to the current decade.

The first paint stroke!! 

And the finished product... 

The other side

So then from August 2010 until around March...other rooms were in focus.  Mainly making the "true" man cave in the basement, as this family room.  But then some creativity sparked again in March of 2011 and this room had a little addition.  We built a hallway....

...painted the new hallway teal...which was a bit out of my comfort zone.

Added a valance that I made and built a console table and a matching bench in the hallway.

And now we have more changes happening.  Yep.  It's never ending.  We ordered new carpet for this room because the current carpet is gross, not comfortable to walk or sit on (there is no pad) and there are lots of spills on it (including some polyurethane...) and the new stuff should be in next week!  YEAH!  When I told Jimmy about the new carpet, I said we were going to have to move all of the furniture out (including the TV and all the wires).  So that gave us the idea to just bite the bullet and hang the TV above the fireplace.  The catch?  We had to figure out a way to hide the wires.  Enter my wonderful dad.  He came over on Sunday and he and Jimmy worked to figure out how to hang it up and where to put he wires, which entailed taking down the mantle that we put up too.  Oh the irony.  Don't worry, it will go back up and hide the wires.

Not the best pic (from my phone)

As always, it's a work in progress.  Mainly because we didn't have a cord to the Wii that was long enough and you know we need that Wii!  Anyways...isn't it amazing how much this room has changed??!!  I'm still loving it.  Yep, and decorating the house is a circular process and goes round and round.

Anyone else working on house projects lately?? I'm working on our 2012 list of things we want to accomplish and will have it up next week!!!