Family Room Progress

Renovations have begun on our family room!  We're about a week in and reaching that point where every day we come home from the office hoping for monumental progress to find...a few wires sticking out of the wall that weren't there when we left.  It's a process and we've been through it before.  To give a preview of what is to come, I will start with my inspirations for the space.

My color inspiration came from one of my favorite shirt/sweater combos--grey and white.  This translated into Benjamin Moore's Titanium:

A bit more subtle than my sweater and perhaps a little more on the warm side, I love the way it plays with white.  There is going to be whole lotta millwork going on in this room, so the color needs to sort of disappear.

Here's what we were dealing with before the contractor took the crowbar to the walls:

If you look veeerrrry carefully at the wall with the small quilt hanging, you may notice that the wallpaper chair rail isn't exactly straight.  There is a very good reason for that quilt.  It's covering a huge diy disaster.  Originally, there was a doorway from the foyer in that spot.  Other renovations were done and in the second photo where you can see the floor surface change, there used to be a wall.  Once the wall was gone, I suspect this created a real furniture placement challenge, ie, no place to put the couch.  The answer was to remove the opening (no biggie), however, the execution lacked, shall we say...finesse.  Other issues included knotty pine paneling that had been painted over (aren't the knots lovely?), the fact that none of the molding is properly mitered/caulked (see the beams and cove millwork where it meets the ceiling).  The beams came with the house and underneath are a stained walnut.  They were going to be hard to remove since they're sort of part of the structure, so my solution was to create a coffered ceiling by adding cross beams.  Something like this, but not quite so heavy:

Here's what we have right now:

The paneling was removed to find a whole lot of nothing behind it besides insulation.  LAM's big request for the space was a pre-wired sound system / home theater setup.  Since we have a car club pal in the business, Hi-Fi Sales in Cherry Hill, NJ is working with our contractor to wire us up.  I had no idea what would be involved with having a seamless installation, but it's coming along nicely.  The wall above was packed out and plywood hung to provide a solid mounting base for the tv.

On the fireplace, we'll be hiding the bricks with carrera marble subway tiles, something like this:

The mantle and trim pieces will be cut down so it's not so high in order to provide clearance for the tv and painted white to match the rest of the trim and a new fireplace screen yet to be determined.

Against the window wall will be a built-in window seat with bookshelves on either side:

This seems the perfect solution for that side of the room, but I'm not sure how to keep dogs out of the window.  It's inevitable that it will be their favorite place in the house and my whole existence will spiral down to nothing but worrying about windexing and stressing about scratches.  We'll see.  Either way, we can't wait to see it all finished!

~ESM