I've teased you long enough...here are the living room afters!

OK, OK.  Now that we've got the WAY before photos from the 1980's out of our systems, I'll give you a real update as to the cumulative work we've done.

Here's how it looked when we officially moved in, August 2008. Pumpkin pie colored, and a shiny paint to enhance all the imperfections from a very bad drywalling job abutting original plaster.  (Shudder). Note the bizarre hole in the wall, likely for allowing heat upstairs, which must have been the design of whoever decided to alter the path of the stairs.  Also note the cold, naked gray of the plaster in the stairway.

In order to stomach the next two years, we painted the whole living room a boring yet vastly improved color, Country Dairy.  At least it brightened up the cavelike room.  Another reason to take down the wall - the south side of the house, which is where we get all our beautiful morning light, is on the opposite side of it.

So, after a few months of this, and this, and this, this, and finally this and this.....

"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..."

We've got THIS!

And best of all...THIS!  

Imagine lots of photos, etc. hanging on this wall in the near future

And even THIS!  No hole in the stairs!  Painted Behr's "Summer Harvest," a nice yellow that reflects light all around.  Painting the rest of the hall was one of our first projects when we moved in two years ago, but we never finished this wall until now.  Good thing we bought an egregious amount of paint.

Well, we've got nothing on the walls yet, but that'll come.  The new, hole-less wall is painted Behr's Wipeout. Light is currently spilling in from the south side of the house.  The insulated curtains were made by me last year, as well as the blanket and pillows on the couch.  All of that from Marden's, including that awesome Ashley leather couch...and even the rug. And the ceiling fan. The white walls remain Country Dairy.

The ceiling has NO POPCORN WHATSOEVER.  We even scraped off the popcorn chunks that had slid down onto the wall during their installation. The fan is now supported by a proper ceiling fan box so it no longer rocks back and forth, threatening life and limb, and is much quieter now that it's hooked up to modern electricity.  Imagine that.

Ahhhhhhhh.

And here's my favorite detail - a brass push-button switch plate cover we discovered in the basement.  We figured out how to rewire the fan just so we could necessitate three light switches in one spot.  That was complicated, because two of the three are three-way switches (I won't bore you with details), but we were so glad we figured it out.  Again, the switches are modern, grounded reproductions, which we bought on Amazon with pretty much all of the money we saved by buying everything else at Marden's.  Every switch we replace will get these from now on, and we have a lot more to go. The switch on the left powers the fan light, the middle one powers the fan itself (sticklers will notice that it's, whoopsy, installed upside down), and the right one powers the light in the entryway. The switches are now in a convenient location next to where you enter the room, not in the middle of the wall next to an outlet that doesn't actually work.

I am SO GLAD this portion of the project is done.  There's more work to be done in the entryway, and we have all the parts to install a woodstove soon.  But that stuff is gravy compared to what we've just been through.  The only real problem is that now I'm going to have to find a whole bunch of new stuff to complain about!