Living Room is Almost Done!

The living room is just about complete.  The only thing remaining is trim-- just a few more baseboards and the trim around the windows.  It's so nice having a functioning living room... with a couch and a tv, and bookshelves.... 

A bit of history...

The only photo of the living room on the MLS listing (it looked like this when we first viewed the house):

At least 2 huge couches in here, lots of tapestries pinned on the ceiling.

The photo we took during our final walk-through, on the day we bought the house:

Blank slate - popcorn ceiling, vertical blind, floors and walls that needed love

In between, it was mostly a storage room.  For years, just boxes and bins and stuff waiting to move into other rooms. 

And now....!!

Just needs the trim on the windows!

And the wall of shelves:

The shelves are pretty bare right now.  I gotta get some more BOOKS on there soon.

Living Room Shelves

K and I got a little sidetracked from our kitchen project...  We needed a little break, so we worked on something cool in our living room. 

I have had a couple Ikea Billy bookshelves forever, and was excited to get those into our living room and get my BOOKS onto the shelves, finally!   But K was reluctant, and couldn't figure right away why she didn't want the shelves and books in the living room.

She came up with the solution a couple days ago-- she would make built-in shelves for the living room.  What bothered her about my bookcases is how they just floated in the room and weren't connected to anything.  She didn't want shelves to be pieces of furniture in the room, she wanted shelves that were a part of the room.  She looked up mid-century shelves and was inspired by the wall units she saw.  Stuff like this:

Image via Google Images

She showed me a plan on Google Sketch-Up, to put shelves on the biggest wall in our living room, using galvanized pipe and wood shelves.  We played around with the measurements and placement of the shelves-- we both agreed it would be cooler if the shelves weren't exactly symmetrical.  And she fit the TV into the unit-- with the idea that we'd move her basement TV to the living room and she'd get a larger TV for the basement.

Planning, measuring, and counting the units of galvanized pipe and pipe fittings, then a couple trips to the Home Depot and we had everything we needed.

The first piece

Babes putting up the 2nd column

We made some mistakes-- it's not the easiest project we've done, that's for sure.  But we figured it all out eventually.  And K found that some oak boards she'd been storing for about 4 years were going to be the perfect amount for making our shelves.  Which was great-- less to buy, and they'd already been salvaged from another project. 

The shelves still need to be stained, but we've made a lot of progress.  We love that we can still see the wall and the coves!

Trying out some stuff on the shelves

Hanging Bar For My "Closet"

K and I both have the smaller single door-sized closets in our bedroom, but we both keep the bulk of our clothes in our offices, and just keep the off-season or dress-up stuff in the bedroom.  My work clothes & everyday clothes are up in my office.  This is nice because we are sometimes getting ready for work at different times, so we don't have to wake the other up.  And our bedroom doesn't have a dresser in it!  It can be uncluttered by our clothing messes, and just contains our bed and two nightstands.

So for the purpose of holding my clothes in my office, I purchased a rolling clothes-hanging thing from Target for 20 or 30 bucks.  Mostly plastic, and after a few months the thing developed a definite lean...  It occasionally falls over, basically.  We had to flip it around and lean it toward the corner of the room so it would lean into the wall, and not fall over when I wasn't even near it. 

Leaning line of clothes...

I've been asking K to put in a permanent hanging bar for me, ever since this thing started tipping over.  But it's tricky, because of the sloped walls in my office.  There isn't a normal bracket for putting up a closet rod that works on a sloped wall.  I did find something online for this purpose, but it was spendy.

While at the Depot yesterday, we grabbed the normal brackets and rod, and K figured she could put triangle-shaped blocks behind the brackets to put them in the right position.  But then something made her think of galvanized pipes!  So we went to that aisle and had fun figuring out how we could use a galvanized pipe and pipe fittings to make a hanging rod.

One 3/4"x 4-foot pipe + 2 flanges + 1 45-degree elbow = the perfect piece to attach to the sloped ceiling and the normal wall at the end of the room.

K attached the flanges to the studs and tested the bar by hanging on it a bit.  It stayed secure!  Should be able to hold lots of clothes.

So, this works great!  I have more room for hangers than I had before.  And the bar certainly isn't going anywhere.

Space on the left could be used for shoes!

It does stick out more into the room than my portable bar did, but we had to put the bar where the wall studs were, and not just wherever it looked good.  The space behind the clothes seemed like it would be wasted, at first, but I realized that I could set up some nice shoe racks back there.  Or maybe shoe cubbies, and then I could put hats and boxes of accessories on top of those.