My Name Is Earl (Gray)

A neutral color for our living room works really well because we have color in our furniture, curtains and rug. Gray seemed like the best way to go, and would pull nice tones from our new tile fireplace.

Chair rail was installed in our living room before we moved in, it got in the way of our furniture layout and seemed to shorten the room. We decided to remove the chair rail before we painted.

Wall patches drying and paint samples on the wall

We went with a color called Cathedral Gray by Behr. 

I had a puppy helper!

 

Finished!

Shine!

It is amazing how much of a difference a new light fixture will make in a room.

Pierre pointed our our "eyeball" living room lights soon after we moved in. At first, I couldn't understand what the problem was with them. Of course, soon that is all I could see in the room and agreed we should switch out the lights. What I didn't know was that you can leave the actual light fixture alone and just switch out the "trim" - this is WAY less expensive than replacing the entire light.

Left - eyeball light                                                        Right - low profile light

We also wanted to replace our standard dome light fixture in the center of the room.

(the dark gray circle is one of our built in speakers)

I never like rushing into buying something like this. I was looking for something fun, something with a little whimsy but also grown-up and modern. Surprisingly, places you may not expect have some very original lights. I found THE light at Pottery Barn Kids on clearance!

We decided to install a ceiling medallion before we installed our new light fixture - this solves the problem of a potential size variance from an existing light cover. 

Pierre shut the power down to the house before working on any of this, and proceeded from here to the installation of our new light.

            

We played around with bulb type but settled on an LED light, we won't have to change this bulb for a while!

Hearth of a Home

The summer brought us an unwelcome surprise - new duct work and a new A/C unit. We have been up to a lot of home projects since recovering, here is our latest!

We have a funny tile story in our house, in that the tile in both of our bathrooms is also the tile on our fireplace. My best guess is that the guy who flipped our house (more on that later), bought one box of tile for the house.
Black marble tile is fine for some people, but for us, it is just that... fine:

Pierre had been talking for a while about demo-ing the tile and re-doing the mantel. I was in the midst of planning an in-house baby shower for my sister so told him we could think about it after the baby shower.

Well, I guess my words were taken literally because the day after the shower, I woke up from a nap to this:

 

Here is the damage to the living room....

Once we start something, we don't stop until we are finished. So, we finished the demo of the tile and mantel and then went shopping for tile with a visa gift card we had been saving for a house project. We looked at Home Depot, Lowes and The Tile Shop. We looked specifically for 2"x8" tile because once we discussed the design, we knew we wanted to do subway tile on the fireplace and a herringbone pattern on the hearth. We found a marble tile we loved and bought one box in a matte finish. Pierre designed the trim pieces and mantel. We hired a friend to do the mantel and tile.

Step 1 - Smooth out the surface

Step 2 - Install new trim

Look at the new (standard) mantel height

Time for the new tile!

        

The living room was a big job, we removed chair rail, installed four new lights and painted... more to come!