Introducing: Living Room and Dining Room

There are only a few things I love as much as reading and running. One of them is digging in and decorating a new house. And lucky me, I just happen to have a new house. I'd planned on getting the family room finished off first, but I kept buying stuff for the living room and dining room, and except for some knicknacks, a rug for the entry, and one more picture (more on that later) I think we're getting close to feeling like the two front rooms are presentable. And it's a good thing, because we don't have any kind of shades for those rooms yet, so the whole world can see what's going on in there, if they're interested in looking.

A word about the house: it was originally built as a two-bedroom bungalow (about 1500 square feet, including the basement) in 1950. In 2008, the house was overhauled. The owner tore everything down to the brick wall out front and the foundation, added a second story and bumped out the back. It's now almost triple the original size, but I think it still looks like it fits in the neighborhood of modest bungalows and ranch houses. There are modern touches (as you'll see later in the kitchen), but the builder said he used the 1930s mock-Tudor houses in the Harvard/Yale neighborhood of Salt Lake as his inspiration. So I'm trying to mix in some modern, some 1950s, and some 30s. I'm not sure how well I'm succeeding.

I'll start with the inspiration for the room, a set of two paintings I commissioned my best friend and partner in crime Leslie (aka smartmama) to paint for me. I took the yellows and blues and browns and grays and used them throughout both the living and dining rooms. The unit underneath is two IKEA Expedit shelving units. Yeah, I know they make a long one with eight openings, but I wanted mine to be just slightly longer than that one so it was at least as wide as the paintings, so I bought two smaller ones. The vases are from the Modern Materials Design store's going out of business sale. In the dining room had great bones to begin with. I love the wainscoting and the paint and the chandelier, and we haven't really added much. I found the corner cabinets on craigslist, brought them home and roped my mom into helping me spray paint them gray on the inside and yellow on the outside (actually a complicated application of both yellow and orange). The chairs are Tolix from the Sundance Catalog outlet. The table is 1950s yellow and white formica with stainless steel legs (another craigslist find). If you ever visited my Texas house, you may remember the plates on the family room wall. I left them with the new owner, so I'm working on a new collection for above the wainscoting in the dining room. I'll show new pictures once I've finished that part of the project.












Here's the view from the family room. That's our front door. The panels on either side of the door are plain white canvases from Dick Blick covered with a fabric called "Vintage Bird Blue" that I bought at Warm Biscuit. As you can see, we still need a rug for the entry, any suggestions?
















Circling around to the left is the "dumping spot" of the entryway. We've had the cabinet since our St. Louis days, but until last week it was a medium blue with flowers stenciled on the top and the front panels. Six cans of spray paint later, it was gray, with baby blue (I'm not too proud to admit they're baby blue) panels. I also spruced up the hardware. Then I painted squares that echo the squares on the aspen painting. The lamp is from IKEA (and doesn't work-- it needs a bulb), the mirror is from our last house and looks much better than the gold one I originally had in the spot.
















A head-on view of the living room. When we were looking at the house, the room seemed such an odd shape, not really an entry, not really a living room, so envisioning it as a living room was a bit of a challenge, but I think the two spaces are fairly well delineated. Here's a lowdown of where stuff is from. The piano and the couch are both long-standing, obituary-worthy members of the Miner household. The couch, however, was red and green plaid until last week, when my slipcover arrived. I've been hating the couch for a while, and now I'm not quite as eager to dump it for the newer model. The best part is that I don't have to take it off to use the sofa bed. The end and coffee tables are apparently from a line that Eames designed for Lane back in the 1950s, and I got them from the KSL classifieds. Chairs are from IKEA, and I hope to replace them and move them to the back porch by next summer. Blue pillows are old Crate and Barrel. Yellow pillows are from the Modern Materials Design sale. Lamps are old IKEA. Lampshades are new IKEA. The rug is Pottery Barn's Maren, which I got cheap from eBay. I think Pottery Barn's marketing technique of using popular children's names probably boosts sales from parents whose children have those names. Or is it just a good looking rug?












Here's probably the thing I'm proudest of in the whole room. When I saw Julie and Julia last month, I fell in love with the framed maps above Julie Powell's bed. So I came home and searched and searched for them. I found an interview with the set designer, who said that they were vintage handkerchiefs. An hour later, I'd ordered four of them, all from the states we've lived in since we were married. Since the window behind the couch is so large and off-center, I wanted to create something that would echo both the size and shape of the window, so I created the frame out of masonite and 1x4s (and, of course, more spray paint). Pretty cool, eh?
















A couple of weeks ago, I was wracking my brain for something to go along the "big" wall in the living room. I remembered a painting that I'd always loved that Eddie's parents had in their basement. We asked if we could borrow it, and they generously agreed, while telling us the history of it (painted by a BYU art professor, Bruce Smith, who lived in the neighborhood and gave it to them in exchange for piano lessons). I still love it, and I'm happy it gets more face time than it did in the basement.



















Last, but not least, another shot of the dining room, which doesn't do much except establish that there are, in fact, two yellow corner cabinets stuffed with tchotchkes in there.






I'll be sure to follow up with other rooms as they near a completed state. You will not see pictures of my family room on the blog until the pee-scented tan couches have been replaced by the Room and Board sectional (with the chaise, in olive) that I've been salivating over for way too long.

There is one small wall left. I'd love some kind of religious art, but not the family proclamation or a big honking picture of Jesus. Any suggestions? I've been looking at Cameron Moll's letterpress print of the Salt Lake Temple, and I really like it, but are all those letters cool or just kind of weird for someone who isn't a font junkie?