Before we broke through to the dining room the living room was quite gloomy. You can see how it looked when we viewed the house - this picture was taken from the kitchen doorway:
On moving day - note the cheap Ikea couch, already dirty from little toddler hands:
First things first: Grant put up some shelves to store videos, CDs etc.
Damp-proofing in the alcoves beside the fireplace:
How it all looked once we first settled in:
Major improvement when we moved the computer desk ...
... and broke through to the dining room:
Painting the room was an adventure. I knew what I wanted: a beige that wasn't too pink, wasn't too yellow, wasn't too light, wasn't too dark ... and didn't exist. I picked a colour from a paint swatch and had it mixed. Then we painted the dining room (at night in artificial light) and when I came down in the morning I was horrified to see that the room was pink. Not just a little pink, not a pinkish beige, but actually pink.
Back down to the DIY place to have some more tint added. Then it was too green. Back and forth 4 more times until finally I was happy with the colour! We proceeded to pain the dining room and lounge.
A while later we were lucky to snag a free mantlepiece through the classified ads at the university where Grant was working. I painted it white and we attached it to the wall. I used a tester pot to paint the wall within the mantlepiece a darker tan colour:
As you can see, we laid laminate flooring too. We bought some very cheap computer cabinets for alcove storage - the advantage being that we could put child locks on the doors to keep Daniel's curious fingers out of everything:
Dressing the alcove shelves:
We replaced our cheap Ikea couch with some leather sofas. They were also cheap but have lasted amazingly well!
We painted the hall door and under-stairs storage door the same colour as the wall to help them blend in:
Rookie artwork mistake alert! A row of pictures too small and hung too high. Tut tut. (I did later replace them with three much bigger square pictures - which now hang on our landing.
I snagged a super cheap Ikea frame in their clearance basement (remember, we were dirt poor) but didn't have anything to put in it for a while. I painted some abstract swipes of colour because I didn't like having an empty frame hanging there:
I later took advantage of a discount offer at my printing lab to print some digital artwork that I'd created of the boys. The wording in the black strip read, "No earthly joy can hold more pleasure than two little boys to love and treasure."
