Living Room, Dinning Room & Nursery Renovations

It's been a while since my last post. With a one year old I don't find a lot of free time. Recently I have been busy redoing the half bath. Before I get into that project I thought I would show some of the work we have done in the past two years. Here are some before and afters images.

First room is the nursery
I tend to forget to take pictures of the before stage... but here is a work in progress. We decided to make a decorative shelf that goes around the room.

Here is the room almost complete. ahh isn't it cute with all the baby stuff.

Here is the completed room with window treatments and a cover for the radiator.

The second room is the dinning room
In this room I made the wainscoting and we decided to use wall paper on the top half. We also decided to keep the original light fixtures.

 

The built-ins were not fun to paint! I did a lot of scrapping and sanding and I stripped the paint off the hardware. The hardware wasn't painted over completely, but there was some sloppy paint jobs in the past and a lot of paint spilled onto them. There is a trick to remove paint off hardware. Buy a used or cheap crock-pot (don't plan to use this for cooking) add some water (make sure all the parts are submerged) and add a splash of household laundry detergent. Let them cook for 6 hours or so. The old paint should almost fall off. You will have to do a little clean up with a soft scrub brush or tooth brush and rinse them with water. I have done this on most of the hardware in my house, it works great.

  
Last room is the living room/"back"room.
The first image is a picture we took before we moved in. The second is a work in progress image... we are still working on the decorating and window treatments for these two rooms. My next post will be about the half bath that is almost complete.