Plans for the Family Room

Plans for the Family Room

The next project on our to-do list is the family room. We recently said that more than anything we just want to take a break from projects, but when this one is done, it’ll mean having nothing to be embarrassed about when company comes over!! (As long as they don’t go upstairs… but we can close those doors! ha) Plus the family room is just paint, furniture and lighting. These are the fun projects!

The family room will need to function as a kid’s playroom, extra TV room, hangout in front of the fireplace room, passthrough to the backyard room, craft room, and for now, our office slash Burritos and Bubbly HQ (until we move the office upstairs to the 3rd bedroom). Talk about multi-tasking!  It’s a kind of awkwardly long space and always dark since the only natural light comes from those north-facing sliding doors (if budget were no object I’d totally add some windows) — cork floors, low ceiling, brick fireplace and beige walls certainly don’t help.

So of course our #1 goal is to make it brighter and lighter. I mean, duh! If you know us at all, that’s our goal in EVERY ROOM EVER. But unlike the rest of our house, in the family room we’re actually painting the walls a color other than white! We think it’ll be a light aqua, similar to the rumpus room in our old house, which was also a dark, north-facing room. I love the idea of going bolder in here and having a ton of fun with color.

The big plan is to paint the walls, paint the fireplace (yay! that’ll make a huge difference), replace the lighting, and then try to make do as much as possible with things we already have (aka, spend as little as possible!). We want it to be a loungey space, that’s comfy for the whole family, fun for a little kid to play in, and grown up enough for us to want to sit in there to work. We’re still figuring out exactly how we’ll do all that!