Before and After...

Today, for show-and-tell, I thought I would post some pics we have taken of our home projects:

Our entry was a bit sparse before.

Then we tried "making do" with and old bookshelf and sewing table. But this did not serve our needs as well as we had hoped, so we are now using a desk that my mother had along with some shelving.

Here is what our entry looks like now:

Adjacent to the entryway, is the living room. Likewise, it needed some help:

As you can see, we had too much chaotic color going on in our living room, and we had a few storage issues, similar to many homeschooling families. Basically, to us, the living room and entry areas needed to be unified into one very useful space as we use this area heavily for our everyday living and our schooling needs.

We decided the colors, sparseness, and disorganization, were causing too much chaos visually, so we opted for one of my favorite colors, Robin's Egg Blue, for the top quarter of the walls, and one of Jim Bob's favorites for the lower three quarters: the color of a nice, clean pair of khaki pants. I'm giggling inside, because if you know Jim Bob very well, you know that he is a very laid back kind of guy at home, and this suits him perfectly. He rarely gets decked-out in anything dressier than a fresh looking pair of khakis.

Remind me to tell you about this old church door
that Jim Bob turned into a corner cabinet

The blue was something we needed in our climate because winter gets rather dreary and depressing here. Everything stays grayish-brown and dead-looking outside for about five months. Coming here from Texas, where winter lasts for about two weeks, that can be a real downer for us, so we decided a cheery blue on the top of the walls so that it looked like a bright blue October sky, or the sky in April after a good rain (and things are beginning to come back to life again) would get us through the winter in a much more cheerful fashion!

We separated the two colors with a simple strip of moulding, painted bright white to match the rest of our trim.

Another reason for these colors: they are calming. With seven people (three grown-ups and four very active children) living in this space, we needed color that would soothe and add peace.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas to make the space more useful?

As you can see in the pictures, our couches are due to be slipcovered. Right now, until I've saved enough to buy the fabric that I need, they are covered with the backs of old quilts. The fabric I have chosen for slipcovers is very washable, and... WHITE! I know, it sounds crazy with four children to use white, but I can bleach white! They are slipcovers, after all.

Thankfully, my mother and I both sew, so this will be a winter project that we will tackle once it is too cold outside to do anymore painting projects. First things first ;).

In my next decor update, I will post pictures of the dining room before and after (including the $20 table that the Lord provided!). See you then!