Home Reno: Living Room + Dining Room

For the next portion of our home renovation, I’ll be taking you into our front entry way, living room and dining room areas. You can check out our family room and kitchen areas here.

I particularly love sitting in this part of the house first thing in the morning because the morning light shines in so pretty during this time of the day! I love to sit on the couch (with the kitties) and enjoy a cup of coffee.

I’m going to share some before and afters of the work we did to create this space, as well as the decor. Enjoy!

Before + Afters

Front Entry

To give this area a little facelift, we started with the front door. While there wasn’t room to put in a larger door, we did spruce it up by painting it white. I didn’t want to swap out the door entirely because I loved the glasswork. It’s so pretty, especially against the white! We also added some new hardware to make it more modern.

As I previously shared in this post, we replaced the tile throughout the house. Originally, the tile was darker and more muted, with this design work at the front entry. The lighter tile helped to brighten the entire home. So glad we swapped it out!

The last change to the entry was a new light fixture. We got all of our lights at Valley Light. We went with a black fixture to pop against the grey walls and white trim work.

Entry Height/ Arch

To help open up the space and really highlight our favorite part of the house (the ceilings), we took up two of the ceilings separating the space. This helped the room appear bigger and allowed for more natural light to flood the space!

We chose to keep one straight across, while the other has a more architectural flare to it. Love how it helped change the space!

Wall Texture/Color + Flooring

When we bought the home, the walls were the Arizona standard texture (“orange peel”) found in most homes. We knew that we wanted to change the texture to help modernize the home. We smoothed the walls and painted the walls grey. The color is “Grey Ghost” by Dunn Edwards. Not sure if they still have it in stock. I checked but couldn’t find it. But, definitely ask them! We also painted the trim white. Love the contrast and pop!

For flooring, we went to Floor & Decor and picked out our wood floor. Such a great local spot to get a great deal on flooring and other home goodies. We also got our fireplace stone from there too! Saved a lot.

Window + Shutters

Another huge selling feature of the house was the windows! We fell in love with them and how much natural light floods in. However, they were slightly hindered with ALL of the shutters. They made the room seem heavy. So, we removed the arched shutters to allow for more light and painted the lower shutters white to match the trim.

We also replaced all of the windows in the home. The original windows were old and black. We replaced them with new, white windows from Home Depot. It really brightened up the interior AND exterior of the home!

Fireplace

For the double-sided fireplace (you can see the other side here), we stripped the stucco off and added stone. We found some inexpensive stone at Floor & Decor. It instantly made the room more warm! For the hearth, I wanted to keep it very natural and neutral. We did a cement hearth. Love how it turned out!

For the mantle, we stained a large piece of wood and had it placed on the fireplace. Love the contrast of the dark wood against the soft palette of the stonework. Just what I envisioned!