Formal Living Room Makeover!

Hubby and I spent the weekend giving my favorite room in the house, the formal living room, a fab makeover. The room, which is supposed to be the female and formal living space of the BDH, is meant to have a Marie Antoinette/Victorian era vibe with some touches of 2013 (hot pink, mercury glass, shag rug) and Whitney (pug figurines, photos of my bridesmaids, my scrapbooks) with light pink, hot pink, pale blue and gold as the room's colors.

 

We had the furniture and decor all situated already - we purchased the vintage sofa and matching chair from an antique store in Smithfield earlier this year, hubby built the console table himself, we painted his old yellow oak coffee table white and distressed it, my mom bought two adorable vintage chairs for us from a coworker and I snagged two little white side tables from Joss & Main and an antique market for $40 and $25. We had my bridal portraits, a vintage mirror from Italy that we picked up at an estate sale, coordinating Italian sconces, my preserved bridal bouquet (thanks bff!) and a big gold painting (that I painted over to make more pink) from an antique shop in VA. Needless to say, the room was in great shape aside from the plain tan walls.

To jazz the place up, we decided to wallpaper the upper half of the walls and do cream wainscoting on the bottom half. When we went to Home Depot this morning to get 155 linear feet of trim to do the wainscoting, we changed our minds when we realized the thin little trim was almost $2 per foot! It would certainly be worth it, probably 10-fold, in added home value, but this was a low/no budget project. We already spent a good deal on wallpaper (its more expensive than we thought), wallpaper supplies and paint and still needed to buy trim to do the new crown molding in the room. We decided to wait on the wainscoting until we do it in several other rooms on the first floor at the same time. Instead, we painted the bottom half cream, which will make adding the wainscoting super easy when the time comes.

We started wallpapering Friday night and thankfully had the help of one of my best friend's moms (and one of my mom's best friends lol) who is a wallpaper GENIUS, not to mention kind of a genius in general. We watched her every move as she did the first few strips, and tried to soak in her expertise. We're happy to report that wallpapering is an adaptable skill, because after studying Beth we became pro's. Seriously, it's so much easier than painting! It probably helped that we (accidentally, but thankfully) bought the pre-pasted paper, but it seriously was a breeze. My mom and dad came to help out Friday night too, which made it extra fun. We wallpapered all night Friday night, a couple hours Saturday morning and all night Saturday night. Then we spent most of the day Sunday with me painting the bottom half of the room and Ross doing molding work on the top of the new paper in the two-story part of the room. Oh, and we also added a ceiling medallion to accent our vintage gold chandelier and tie in the cream from the bottom half of the room.

We're so pleased with the result! The Lady Cave is now a complete room, ready to entertain the female loves of my life, my fab female neighbors and their adorable little girls, and most often, my white pekingese Toula and I with a good book (we already re-read a couple chapters of House Bunny in the new room this weekend). Here are some photos of the before, during and after. What do you think barbs?

BEFORE (lots of tan!):

 WALLPAPERING:

 AFTER!

These guys weren't very helpful:

Thanks for reading barbs! xox