Back to the Tour

I would like to start this post by thanking you all for taking this journey with me.  I know that my "tour" post have been a bit sporadic but I have really enjoyed going back and looking at all of my Before pictures.  Although The House is nowhere near being finished (not sure it ever will be) it has been so great to go back and remind myself of where we started and how far we have come in the past year.

Today we are going to take a look at The Front Room.  If The Porch is what drew us to The House then The Front Room is what sold us for it.  The details in this room are extraordinary.  This is also, I think, one of the rooms that we put the most work into.  Looking back at these pictures - I am not really sure what we were thinking at the time. 

The first thing we had to do in this room was the demo (as with all the other rooms).  Of course, I use the word demo loosely because it's not like we were knocking down any walls or anything.  All of other old molding had to come down.  The hearts HAD to come off of the fireplace.  There were these weird peg board type things on either side of the fireplace.  The windows (again) had awful cornice boards and plantation shutters that had been painted closed.  There was also a ton of patch work that needed to be done on the walls.

After all of that came the cleaning.  I am not sure these floors had ever been scrubbed so hard in their entire life!  We swept, we vacuumed (there were pine needles in almost every crack of the floor), we mopped, we scrubbed, we polished, and then we did it all again:)

Finally came paint and construction.  We were lucky that all of the family came together to pitch in with this room.  The Husband and The Grandpa quickly got to work on the crown molding which seemed to change the feel of the room completely.  My Mom aka The Grandma and I worked to get all of the trim primed and ready for The Husband and the Papa to paint it.  Painting the wainscoting proved to be a problem because a) it is made of individual boards and b) those boards were painted black.  Which meant that there were black cracks in our white wainscoting.  Enter the contractor packs of caulk!  I have to believe that the boys went through at least 24 tubes of caulk that day but the end product was well worth it.

So, finally the room was finished and I am so happy with how it all turned out.  There is still some decorating that needs to be done.  I would love to fill our couch with all sorts of throws and pillows but struggle with pulling the look together.  For now it is just a sea of brown but I am okay with that.  I would also like to get rid of the curtains on the windows and get some beautiful plantation shutters that match all of our interior doors.  We are also playing around with different facades to put on our fireplace.  I really love this fireplace over at The Lettered Cottage but we would need to find a way to make it work on our fireplace.  So, it's like I said that the beginning of this post - I am not sure we will ever really be done with this house:)