Our Color Blocked Family Room Reveal with Frogtape

Um, I’ve been keeping a secret.  If you know me, you know that I am really good at keeping private secrets that you don’t want shared.  However, when it’s an exciting surprise and it’s good news, I have a hard time… the last month has been a test of my willpower. We spent most of May working our booties off on our basement family room because I am competing in Frogtape’s Paintover Challenge this year with 14 other talented DIY bloggers!!!  EEEP!  I couldn’t believe it when they emailed me and asked if I’d be interested… where do I sign?! It’s been killing me not to share this space with you because we’ve been living with it now for a few weeks, and are just loving it!  Today is all about showing you the space, and will be heavier on photos and shorter on words. Nope, scratch that… I wrote that intro then wrote the post, and apparently I had a lot to say.(This post is in partnership with Frogtape.)

With the help of my family, we actually did several DIY projects in this space, and I’ll point them out in this post.  Tutorials will be coming!

Before I show you much more, let’s take a look at where this space started… These photos are from the listing, but trust me, we did nothing in this space before except add furniture.

Here it is at Christmas with our futniture:

And now let’s get to some of these afters, because that’s what we are here for, right?

The project with the biggest impact was our color block fireplace wall, and you can find a bulleted how-to over at Frogtape now. You can also see the atrocity that this space was the begin with over there.  It was baaaaad. You should definitely go see for yourself. There was a reason you rately saw this room before. Now, it’s a space that we loooove hanging out together in and I am proud to share.

With this challenge, we were each given a $500 budget to recreate our spaces, and could not spend a penny over.  I am proud to say I was over $100 under.  (Jazz hands!) Of course, that also has to do with the fact that the thrift stores have just opened and didn’t have much, and Target’s shelves were pretty bare of home decor, so my budget was used on paint, DIY supplies, some planters and loads and loads of plants!  My theme was natural beauty, so I knew that I wanted to work with greens, whites, natural textures and elements, as well as plants, plants, and more plants. I used furniture I already had in this space, art I already owned, and many accessories that were already in my stash.

As you can see, the lighting still needs to be changed, but that would have put me over budget, so that will wait. We also removed the mantle for now, but I believe we will replace it with a new one.  I was just afraid that if it went wrong at this moment, I wouldn’t have time to fix it.  It’s a project I wanted more time on since we will have to mount it on brick.

Let’s talk about what we did do now!

Project 1: Paint the Fireplace

I am no stranger to painting fireplaces, and painted the one in our old house black.  I loved it SO much because it helped to hide our TV. In this house, we had discussed moving the TV from the fireplace to the side (where you see it above), so I was thrilled to use a color instead of black and settled on a dark moody earthy green.

I will have a post coming with all of the details on how we painted this fireplace as well as the color.

Project 2: Paint the Walls White

When we bought this house, this room had been painted a weird gray with lavender undertones.  I assume they painted everything light and neutral to sell, and they used this color in several spaces.  It photographed much better than it was in person, but I strongly disliked it. We’ve used white paint on several of the walls in our home so far and had plenty left to tackle the walls of this space.  It’s a rather large room, but we covered it with free paint, no problem! In addition to the “family lounge” area, it also has an alcove we have reserved for a game table.

Seeing our gray sectional against the white walls makes me so happy… that lavender gray was killing my vibe.

Project 3: The Color Block Wall

Once the walls were painted white, we let that sit for a week, and the next weekend we tackled the color block wall.  If your eye is discerning, you can see that the color block is not the same green as the brick.  I wanted to add a little visual interest so I chose a shade a little lighter, and it was actually leftover paint from Wilder’s ceiling, so once again free to me!

As I mentioned, you can find my little tutorial for this color block pattern over at Frogtape.

This room is long and narrow, so it’s hard to capture it really well, but I am so pleased with the outcome.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure h ow color block would work on paneled walls, but I am glad I went for it anyways.  The lesson there is don’t let yourself be inhibited too much by pre-existing conditions!

Project 4: Add Shelves

I knew that I wanted our TV to sit on top of the cabinet to the right of the fireplace, but I wanted to frame it out so it wouldn’t be such a honking eye sore.  I decided to singular shelves at a height just above the TV on either side for symmetry.

Again, I will have a separate post about these as well, but I love that they gave me more surface area to play with as well as a frame for our television.

Project 5: Create Large Scale Art for Hardly Any Money

The big blank wall behind our sofa was calling. I didn’t want to do a gallery because I didn’t own all the right pieces already, and I didn’t want to spend my budget on art.  Additionally, I like to gather special pieces over time rather than force it.  Originally the bison was hanging there, and the TV was on the fireplace, but I wanted to shift all of that around, leaving the sofa wall open.

With a $5 drop cloth, Emmy and I created this piece of modern art for our family room.  I love that she was a part of it because it’s all the more special now.

I’ll have a full tutorial coming on this piece as well. 😉

Project 6: Accessorize!

As I mentioned earlier, we used furniture we already had, and we actually didn’t move any of it.  Every single piece was exactly where it was when this makeover started.

With accessories, I wanted to stick closely to me theme of natural beauty, and use several natural elements.

On the coffee table, I added a huge midcentury wooden bowl I found years ago at a flea market, antlers I painted years ago, and a plant in a planter I’ve had for some time.

Pillows were all pulled from my stash. I had actually purchased the green ones when we were staging our old home, and they were perfect with these new color block walls.

The cabinets were styled with my collection of design books, my record player and record collection, and plants.

The shelves were decorated with plants, and art and vases I already had.  I did purchase a couple of white planters, though not the one below.

The table was set with a runner I purchased, a basket I already had, a new plant, and green candlesticks I’ve had for 13 years.

I will be back next week with the start of the tutorials on this space.  Which project do you want to learn about first?

In the meantime, I’ll be over here chilling in my new lounge, and spinning some old tunes. 😉