House Tour: Formal Living/Dining Room -- Before & After

Now that you've seen the outside, we'll start making our way through the rest of the house. Here's the formal living room and the formal dining. These rooms are the first rooms you enter from the front door. There are some really great features including super-high ceilings, tons of built in bookcases, a fireplace, and fantastic windows overlooking the patio and backyard. 

When we bought this house, the living room had some lovely carpet with wood in the adjoining entry, formal dining, and study. Of course, I had my all-too-talented dad on the case and we ended up with some amazing hardwoods. (I'll talk more about those in another post, another day.)

We are using the original front door and updated it a bit with a coat of black. We also replaced the handles in here and throughout the house with black levers. Eventually, we'll replace the door with something else because it is definitely not our style, but for now, it is fine.

We also painted out the walls, all of the circa-90s pickled/glazed woodwork got a few coats of creamy white lacquer and we updated the original brass-finished lantern with a fun metal/crystal pendant light. The French doors went from white to black.

In the dining room, we used the same color on the walls and crown moldings and also painted out the plantation shutters (sounds easier than it actually is). I saved the ugly brass light fixture in here with a really easy transformation that saved us a few hundred dollars. (I'll take it where I can get it!)

The details:

Walls: Sherwin Williams Modern Gray

Trim and Woodwork: Sherwin Williams Dover White

French Doors: Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black

Wood Floors: Custom stain mix, satin finish

Light Fixture: Overstock.com

*BEFORE*

*AFTER*

Future to-do:

Replace front door

Replace windows

Update fireplace handles; replace gas-burning logs with something more modern.