Being Crafty - Home Edition - PCH

I'm all moved in and ready to start morphing this house into our home.  We've completed the fireplace in the family room (posted about that here), had the TV mounted on the wall, and bought a rug to compliment the space.  I will show pictures once we finish selecting paint and hiding the cable paraphernalia.

Although this is not a knit or crochet WiP Wednesday, here is a work in progress on a room in our home.

Here is the room that I had the most brainstorming about so far, the formal living room.  Formal living rooms are treated very differently now than they were when people entertained guests in a much different fashion....FORMAL.  What this really means to people now, is a fancy room with "do not touch" stuff in it that you never ever use, not even for having guests over.  I wanted this room to be useful to us and our growing family, so Mr. Hollybroke and I decided to make it a sort of library, office space.  We have bigger plans in the future for this room as we want to convert it to our formal dining area and use the dining room to expand the kitchen, but this is many moons and lots of $$$$ away.

I started with just pinning things and creating a sort of rough inspiration board on Polyvore.  The room was dark gray with a greenish tint to it....the color itself was ok, but the room gets no sunlight and so remains quite dim and I decided we needed to go with a bright, saturated yellow.

Here is the living room, originally:

Here are the colors I chose, I will not put what paint brand I used, as I was not happy with its performance, but I'd like to recommend to spend a bit more money on your paint as this means you will only need one or two coats to cover instead of 5 or more.

Sunny Summer for under the chair rail and Summer Harvest for above.   The chair rail is white.  You can see here what I mean by several coats of paint and still the color below is coming through.

Next we had to decide on the "built-in" situation.  We don't have the kind of money required to hire a professional to make custom built installations, so we decided to do some extensive internet searching.  Ikea and Overstock had the best options for us and we purchased a wine rack from Overstock and the Liatorp bookcase, desk, and bridging shelf from Ikea.  Everything is white (wood tones are too difficult to match and white fits the idea better anyway).

We are now in the present.  Painting is complete and some of our "built ins" are together and in position. We used the largest Liatorp bookcase to give the illusion of floor to ceiling.  We are still investigating about removing the decorative molding on all the pieces and then adding some of our own molding so that it all matches.  The desk came next and we love it.  It's really quite large and looks so pretty in the space.

Here is a shot of our "Library".  We are still very much "in progress" as we look for more furniture, a rug, and some trinkets to tie it all together.  I'll show you the other pieces after we get them in place and loaded up with stuff.

We also had some DIY projects to do and I will post about those as well.  But, if you notice in this picture, that ugly vent register...?