Our Lounge Renovation: Before & After

We’re about 85% done with our lounge renovations, we’ve still got some finishing touches to do but we’re pretty much at the end of our to-do list and I can’t believe how much of a difference it’s made to the entire house. It’s a room that we’d put off doing anything to as we felt a little lost with what we wanted to achieve. So we took everything back to basics and the finished result is exactly what I wanted for this space as we’re pretty limited to what we can do with the area but I think the things we have done have had a huge impact and they look a little something like this...

before

This is what the room looked like before we did anything do it, the only changes that had been made since we’ve had the house is that it was painted white but we’d pretty much left it alone until now and it's one of the most used rooms in the house. It had become a seriously sorry state as it was dominated by the striped carpet and the fireplace which had a chunk missing from it when Josie chewed it as a puppy. It’s not a tiny space but it is an awkward shape as it’s 3 doors in one of the corners which means with our current furniture that we knew we wouldn’t be changing the layout couldn’t change at all but the room needed to be shown some serious love.

Our plans

If we were staying in our house a little longer we’d thought about knocking our living room into the dining room to make it one huge living/dining space. Which is what a lot of people have done our street but for the amount of time we’re staying there is no point in undertaking such a big job. So our plans were relatively simple, the most important thing was changing the carpet as it was in dire need of replacing and then we wanted to freshen up the walls and the woodwork as it was all faded and looked pretty awful once we moved all the furniture out. Something we didn’t believe we would be able to change was the fireplace, it’s a working gas fire that we don’t use a lot but it would be a big cost to either get rid of it or change it to a wood burner. But after trawling the internet for ideas of what to do with it we realised we could tile over the existing ceramic and of course paint the wooden surround which would make it look like it was brand new. In terms of a colour scheme, we knew there would be a black, white and grey palette with a lot of greenery thrown in so it’s not so monochrome but still simple that nothing would clash. Part of me was tempted to paint the walls super dark but as it’s not a big space it might have been a little overwhelming.

The result & The highs & The lows

This space turned out even better than I’d hoped and it’s now a room I love being in rather than dreading walking into it and feeling frustrated with how it looks but not knowing what to do. Tiling and painting the fireplace made such a huge difference and was surprisingly easy to do and it’s easily my favourite part of the renovation. Even though you can still see where Josie took a bite out of the back it looks so much better now it’s had a coating of heatproof paint. Of course, the carpet made an undeniable change too and it’s tied everything in so nicely together and the space looks well considered now which is exactly what I wanted.

Thankfully the renovation was generally drama free and didn’t take a crazy amount of time either as we were able to do it all ourselves apart from the carpet. Which leads me to our biggest issue which was getting the carpet fitted, we had some problems with the company we used (United Carpets). They told us to remove our old carpet grippers which wasn't easy but when they arrived they told us that was wrong and they might not be able to fit the carpet that day due to this happening as we hadn't bought more at the time. Safe to say we weren’t all that pleased about this as we'd gone off their advice and after a few phone calls managed to get the issue sorted out only then to be told our house hadn’t been measured properly. The carpet was eventually fitted but in terms of service, we were so disappointed with the mistakes made as we ultimately had to pay for it when they were a company error.

We’ve still got a few things on our to-do list for the room, like possibly putting shelves into the alcoves but we’re pretty much done. Next up on our list is to paint the kitchen and the porch and then I think we might be done with what we do to this house which feels strange to write.