The Family Room

Well, the family room is PAINTED! and the blinds are hung! Hooray! I have actually had the blinds for several months now. I bought them from JC Penny on clearance for $15 a piece! I didn't want to hang them up, though, until after I had painted. Less of a hassle. So, I'm glad I painted the bedroom before this room, because it made this one feel like a piece of cake! I started it on Saturday night and finished on Sunday afternoon. Our family room is also the play room. It's upstairs, and it's the only room in the house with a TV. We decided to make it kind of fun and make it half New England Patriots (for me) and half Tampa Bay Bucs (for Matt). So, I picked gray for the color, because it was the only overlapping color for both teams (yes, I know the Bucs colors are red, black and pewter... but that was just too dark!) Anyway, I'm really happy with how the color turned out. I also think it looks great with the red roman blinds. I'm going to buy some Bucs fabric and some Patriot's fabric and make curtains... two windows on one wall will be one team, and the two windows on the other wall will be the other team!

Okay, so here is the "Before" (Oh,and I finally figured out how to put pictures in the middle of my post! Ya, I know I'm slow. Those of you who use blogger are going to think I'm an idiot!)

And, here are the "After!"

I moved the toy box against the back wall under the window to make more room for Andy's car mat. Also, since the toy box used to be to the side immediately after you walked through the door, it seemed to collect a lot of clutter. I'm hoping to avoid that by putting it a little more out of the way.

I made some space on the other side of the room for Andy's little table and chair. This is where he colors. I had those additional block mats stored in a closet, so now they are being put to good use!

Eventually I would like to do some kind of toy storage on this wall on either side and paint a big chalkboard square in the middle. Right now, it's just kind of blank. We don't really need any kind of organized toy system yet, but I can see the need for that in the future if we have more than one child!

This is Matt's vintage Bucs lamp. Personally, I think it's really cool and I'm excited to buy a shade for it and have it functional in the room. The only issue I have with it, is that I can NOT find a matching Patriots one! Right now, this sits to the left of the TV. The poor little empty spot on the right side is just screaming for a matching lamp! I found ONE website that sells these. They didn't have any Patriot's ones and the ones they did have were well OVER $200. Sigh. I suppose if I could just find a vintage helmet, I could make my own lamp. That is a definite possibility!


Otherwise, as far as decorations go, Matt had a vintage Bucs pennant, so I bought a "matching" vintage Patriot's pennant off of Ebay for $5 and we are going to frame those and hang them on our respective team's walls. I'll probably also make some pillows for the sofa. I can't even tell you how relieved I am to finally have this done! I told Matt that I honestly feel like I've been painting for 4 years straight. He told me that is because I pretty much have been! Between renovating the two NC houses (including the whole exterior of one of them!), repainting our entire rental house because I was "nesting" when I was pregnant with Andy, and tackling this house one room at a time... I will be soooooooo glad when I'm done here. It is fun though, trying to turn this house into a home, one room at a time!