update: living room

It's hard to even remember that THIS was once our living room! As I write this, I'm snuggled up right where the fireplace should be. When we received keys - we had no idea what secrets this space had in store for us. Namely: mold and an uneven base floor.

Right away, we decided that a wood burning fireplace was not for us. It took up a lot of space. Space that we knew would be needed for...

 jumping off couches, 

and a lot of football watching. 

So out it came. The only memory we have of the fireplace (now) is a chimney to nowhere on the exterior of the house. 

Also, as I mentioned before we quickly realized we had a mold problem. A pipe in the wall had a significant cut in it so that each time the washing machine ran its cycle.....water was DRIPPING out of the pipe!!! Leaving mold in its place (pictured below).  That meant the entire bottom half of the drywall needed to be replaced. 

MOLD! 

Pipe with a very obvious cut. 

Drywall: REMOVED!

New and mold-free drywall

After ripping out the old carpet we discovered that the cement slab had not been poured correctly. We probably could have left it but T$ figured that since we were already in construction mode, it was time to make it right. Thankfully, in our community, we knew a guy who does this for a living and loaned out the tools so T$ could get the job done: jack hammering out the old floor and laying new concrete. 

New concrete pour. New drywall. No fireplace. 

 For the accent wall, we chose Miller Paint's deep waters.

And here it is today. Again, it's still a work in progress. But it has already become a place we love to gather with friends and family. The toy box in the background is hardly ever closed - ready to explode at any second with all of its excavators, dump trucks, recycle trucks, garbage trucks, baseball bats, golf clubs, hockey sticks... We also have plans and dreams for a built-in book shelf around the television. I've been looking here and here for inspiration. 

There are still a few things we would still like to accomplish in this room: 

• built in bookshelf
• a fire insert below the television
• a railing (insert nervous face emoji). As of today - zero babies/children/adults have accidentally fallen from the open space although I'm not sure that will always be the case. We have an almost crawler on our hands. 

Some regrets we (already) have: 

• The carpet we chose! It's so white! It's so clean! And it shows absolutely every little speck of dust, dirt or baby spit up. 
• Carpeting the ENTIRE space. This living room leads to the garage which naturally tracks in a lot of dirt, etc. Even in a no-shoes house, the carpet just inside the door is already pretty sad. In the future (aka when the rest of the house is done) I think we want to switch out the entry space to either match the tile in the bathroom or the hardwood flooring in the kitchen.