Living Room upgrade - halfway through

We were busy this weekend.  We are now officially down to the TWO week mark until we have our 20 week sonogram and find out if Baby Carter is a little girl or little boy.  And that also means when the nursery planning begins.  So in the mean time Jimmy and I have just been kicking our feet up on the couch enjoying the quiet weekends.  Haha...psych.  I mean really, do you know me at all people?  Of course I have come up with like 17 more things I want to do that have all stemmed from this nursery project that I have put myself, Jimmy and my dad to work on.  Here is the first one.  In the living room.

We haven't done much with this space really except furnish it, put a cable outlet in and paint the back of the built ins black versus the very sexy pink they were before (remember the old owner was a miniatures collector...).  This room was literally transported from my old condo.  Which I should put pictures of on the blog because really that is the only way I remember things these days is through this blog.  I digress.  Yes, the living room.  Since the room that the nursery will go in is now functioning as our office and second guest bedroom...we need somewhere to have a little desk and filing space.  So my mind went to work.  Where could that be?  And see that space in between the 2 built ins...yep, where the black TV stand (which is really a desk, it's tricky) is today? That my friends was my vision.  Change that into a desk area....BUT make it so it doesn't really look like a desk area because guess what, you are in the living room?  Complicated?  Always.  A good challenge full of lots of pinterest searching?  Oh yeah.

I had two bookshelves I already built the weekend before ready to go (measured just perfectly to butt up right against each of the current built ins) that needed to be painted.  A fresh coat of paint you say?  Why yes...but after taking a good hard look at the current built ins and the yellowy-whitish color they had become after so many years of neglect, I decided that they needed a good fresh coat of paint as well.  And I needed to organize my cabinets below that were crazy.

So while Jimmy primed the fresh wood bookshelves I built, I taped off the cabinets and on went a fresh coat of paint (mind you, this is all low VOC Behr paint...I promise I did ask my doctor if I could paint and she said yes, just don't inhale it.  Hmmm- I think I can handle those instructions.).  Then up went the TV (with my dad's help - trying to avoid that heavy lifting) - mounted on the wall at the perfect height.  And it swivels so we can see it from the kitchen.  Pretty fancy.  And ridiculous that we have 3 flat screen TVs that are all hanging on the walls - what has this world come to?!

Another view...

And then they worked their magic again, my little worker bees, and gave me just what I wanted which was hidden cords so it looks like the TV turns on from magic and not electricity. 

While they were doing that - I was painting in the garage (well ventilated space, doctor's orders) on a beautiful and sunny day in February.  Didn't even have a coat on.  Pretty awesome. 

There were new bookshelves and old bookshelves to paint.  And see those cabinets?  Yep, those are going in the downstairs family room for some new built ins (hmmm- I think I'm obsessed with built ins), since we hung the TV above the fireplace and don't need that TV stand either.  Sad.  But that one gallon of paint did a lot of good freshening up old things and making new things look fancy.

My hands and the paint, well that was another story.  And my hair.  And neck.  And arms.  I apparently am a sloppy painter!

Cabinets for the downstairs (got these wall cabinets 20% off at Home Depot a few weekends ago).  They are wall cabinets, so I'll build a frame on the bottom to elevate them off of the ground, but they were the perfect depth with the fireplace of 12 inches.  I have a feeling someday soon these might be filled with toys.  And I'm pretty excited about that.

New bookshelves, upside down.  Will be finished off with some nice trim!

And the freshly painted cabinet doors.

We are starting to put everything together now since the paint has had a few days to dry and it's looking good!!!  More photos soon.  The one thing left to build?  Something like this little beauty!  Going to put a bench/ottoman in between the bookshelves (have about 32 inches to work with) that houses all our important and frequently used files so they get from the mail box to the file faster that they do today.  Our island is begging for some clean space where the mail lives for days....

Ballard Designs