anniversary part 2

study

My off farm job, which is never mentioned, is what pays the bills around here! I work remotely, so it was SUPER important that my study was one of the first rooms to be properly furnished. It needed to be clean and calm so I could pretend I wasn't living in chaos and focus on the task at hand. This house has a "home office", but I don't like the light or the view from that room, so I picked this one which we called The Horse Room. If the furniture arrangement seems strange to you, then you just need to watch like 1,000 Feng Shui videos on You Tube, imagine how you would process those if you were me, and then you will begin to understand.

These are kitchen islands that I put in the closet for my unattractive office items.

Sleeper sofa for overflow guests. Also, the only comfortable sofa we have!

These 'after' photos are not an accurate depiction of what this room is like now that I am fully unpacked and it's unlikely that photos of the current state will be posted here. It's like a physical representation of my brain and nobody needs to see that.

the evolution of the family room

My plan for this room was just to paint the red accent wall navy. It was a really nice shade of red, it just didn't match our furnishings and I thought the navy would be super sophisticated.

Nice, right? That rug looked gorgeous with the blue wall. I really do love this look, but the problem is that this is an open floor plan we weren't loving the other areas.

The whole main first floor area still felt kind of cold to me, and I had seen some photos of a house with totally gorgeous terra cotta colored ceilings so...

Firstly, I LOVE the orange ceiling, love love love. It makes the house feel weird enough for us and it makes the ceiling in the open plan area more interesting, but now the family room looks like a Denver Broncos themed man-cave.

I decided to hang art and see if I got used to it. It's still like this, but I did buy some wallpaper so stay tuned for the continuing evolution of this room!

Also, the furniture could be rearranged because the pellet stove visible in some of the photos above is now gone. Let me tell you a story:

One morning this winter I woke up approximately 10-15 minutes after Chris left for work. There was a weird burned, smokey smell in the house so I went downstairs to investigate. The whole open plan area was FULL OF SMOKE!!

Is it possible that this happened to start the moment Chris walked out of the house? I'm thinking not. He is single minded in the morning and apparently will just head to work even if the house is on fire.

For anyone not familiar with pellet stoves, you put a bunch of pellets into a hopper and then the stove augers out a few pellets at a time to burn. At any given time, maybe a quarter to a half cup of pellets are actually burning and there's 30-40 pounds of pellets in the hopper. Well, something went wrong and the pellets IN THE HOPPER were ON FIRE!!! EMERGENCY! I poured water in the hopper and the whole house filled with steam, but the fire situation was over and I could switch to calling my friends and family to accuse Chris of attempted murder.

Heating with pellets is a totally amazing, environmentally friendly, way to heat, and when installed properly they are very safe. However, this stove had both undersized vent piping and also like 10x more elbows in that piping than are allowable. The stove was in the middle of the house and the vent piping had to snake upstairs and then over and then up again until it finally got to the roof. The distance and the elbows would have been fine if the pipe diameter was correctly sized. This probably worked fine for casually using the stove for a fire on a chilly evening, but then we moved in and cranked the pellet stoves up full time. Anyway, it probably wasn't attempted murder, and in Chris' defense, that stove always smelled like woodsmoke when it was running, but that stove was now dead. When they catch fire like that (back burn is the proper term), all of the sensors are damaged beyond repair, and pouring a bunch of water inside it probably didn't help. We replaced the stove, but installed the new one in the kitchen diner, so you have that to look forward to in a future post!

Another thing that we have updated is the media area that you can see in the before photo. The birch slab doors were nice, but they didn't go with the traditional feel of the house and they also didn't cover the messy area under the TV. Well, if it was our stuff under the TV it was/is messy. Also, our TV didn't fit inside so we opted to hang it in front. This isn't quite finished yet, the TV needs to be lowered so you can see the shelf above it and the sound bar that lives there. Hopefully once that's done, it won't look like just a hole (fingers crossed!). The small doors to the right and left of the TV are pull-out CD racks, so the fact that they don't open isn't an inconvenience.

We also repainted all of the walls, doors, and moldings in this area to brighten everything up a bit and de-emphasize the pre-finished white doors. It makes a big difference to me!

Hopefully this long post basically about a living room hasn't put you to sleep, see you in the next installment!