Living Room and Picture Frames Re-do

Learning To Love Less

In December 2017 we sold our 3000 sq.ft. house in town and moved into a 1100 sq.ft. manufactured home on 2.5 acres. We knew when we first moved back to our small town that we wanted a country house. When we saw these 2.5 acres for sale we jumped on the opportunity to grab up some land to build our dream house on. It was a bonus that this land already had a house on it so we wouldn’t have to rent while we built.

Now, for the big surprise, I actually love this manufactured home. I guess my competitive nature has been unleashed on this thing as I transform it into a home for us. Even though this house is not our forever home, it is our for now home and I am having so much fun beautifying it. Since the house is in decent condition, we do plan on selling and moving the house itself once we no longer need it, but we could end up living in this thing for several years as we save up and prepare to build.

Living in this fixer-upper has taught me some big lessons so far. When we first bought the place, I was kinda embarrassed to be moving into an old manufactured home. It certainly wasn’t and still isn’t my dream home, but here is where the lessons come in. I don’t have to live in my “dream home” to be happy and content. I began to realize that home building and house decorating was taking its place as an idol in my life rather than a hobby. Every time I looked at Pinterest and Instagram I would feel so discontent with my home and possessions. Coveting, i suppose is the term, brought me down big time, and I didn’t even want anyone to come over. Then one day God finally got through to me, I have SO much. Our families dream of being in the country had already been realized and living in the moment is way more fulfilling than dwelling on what you might have in the future.

The Living Room

Our living room is 17ft x 12ft which is smaller than my husband and I’s old master bedroom. The two things we really wanted to keep were our sectional couch and piano. We had to get pretty creative to get both of these chunky pieces into our little space. Especially since the piano can’t be put against a window for moisture reasons. (Never realized pianos are so delicate). Anyways, I am pretty happy with what we were able to come up with.

Check out a tutorial for our pallet coffee table here.

Having the piano here makes our front entrance a little tight, but this door is never used as the homes main entrance so I’m OK with it.

I found this little desk as Home Goods and it fits nicely into our little corner space.  The ledge and beam above are DIY projects to come in the future, but I do have plans to wrap the beam in wood and create a wood shelf connecting the top of the kitchen cabinets and the top of the wall.

Here is a before of the living room from the houses property listing. As you can see, we ripped out all of the carpet and installed wood flooring throughout most of the house. I also re-pained, replaced all of the molding and installed faux shiplap on our main living room wall.

This is a great tutorial for faux shiplap. The installation was so easy and we love the end result. We purchased 1/4in. plywood at our local building supply store for about $20.00 each. I had the guys at the store cut my panels into 6 inch strips because I don’t have a table saw. This cost me a few cents a cut and was way worth it!

In total the whole project cost us around $60.00. This doesn’t include paint because I used some that I had already purchased for another project. An important tip to mention is that we did NOT glue our strips to the wall. Don’t do this unless you want to replace all of your sheetrock when/if you decide to take the shiplap down.

Picture Frame Makeover

When I built my re-claimed wood shelves for my living room wall, I threw a bunch of pictures on the top shelf. None of the frames matched each other or the farmhouse style I was going for in my home.

 

I liked the fact that the frames were not all exactly the same, but I needed to change their style and bring them together somehow. To solve this problem I decided to give them all a fresh coat of white paint and then distress them for the rustic effect.

Chalk paint would be the best paint option for this project, but I didn’t have any and wasn’t about to spend that kind of money on this small of a project. I did use a high quality paint/primer combo, but I wasn’t to worried about it since I don’t expect my frames to see much wear and tear.

I really like the finished product. All of the frames match each other and my husband actually noticed the change right away which is a good sign.