A Little Update

Being the type-A personality that I am, it pains me to show you this work in progress.  In the same vain, I also can't stand to keep it from you anymore.

You may recall that we hired Abby, from a Delightful Design to help us tackle our decorating delimmas for our new living room space.  She has been a delight to work with and I can only assume she got her moniker for her carefree spirit!
 
Let's bring you up to speed.  Our original space had great bones.  After all, something had to attract us to this lovely home.  I assure you it wasn't the appeal of packing up, moving, and losing some favorite pieces of furniture due to size!  So here was our living room before we moved in.

Before:

This is the before of the bookshelves.  

The bookshelves cover the entire length of the longest wall and are the main focal point of our living room.  While beautiful and great for storage, they were a bit underwhelming on design.  

Abby proposed that we wallpaper the backs of the shelves with grasscloth.  Yikes!  I hate wallpaper and I've never used it (the primary reason I hate it).  It's so permanent, what if I don't like it, isn't grasscloth outdated?  These were the thoughts running through my little pea brain.  After going to a local shop and discovering it was very much back in vogue, I began to be able to breath a little easier.  Maybe she's not crazy.  Maybe she does know what she's talking about, I thought to myself.  Wes, who was also skeptical at first, began to turn the corner as well.  We finally bit the bullet and ordered it!

When it arrived, I was still so nervous about tackling the installation.  It haunted me on the kitchen counter for over a week before I finally opened the package.  I had read somewhere about using a hot glue gun to hang fabric in the back of kitchen cabinets, so I thought that might be a less permanent solution for me as well.  I began my internet search and found a blogger who used spray adhesive for the very same grasscloth project.  I scampered to the dredges of hell Walmart to buy my supplies.  Of course there couldn't just be 1 type, no there were 4.  I grabbed the one that said semi-permanent because of my aforementioned phobia.

Fast forward to my weekend project.  Silly me, I thought I could tackle this job alone.  I also thought I could knock it out while Sawyer took his 1 1/2 hour nap.  Wrong on both accounts.  Long story short, the spray adhesive did nothing.  Nothing!  Probably shouldn't have gotten the semi-permanent for such a heavy material.  1 lesson learned.  After yelling at Wes, spraying myself with adhesive, burning myself with the glue gun multiple times, running out of grasscloth and having to piece it, and taking 3 days to finish the installation, I present to you the final product (minus the shelves being styled, of course).

After:

 

 

And here's a before and after, side-by-side.  (Note:  Yes, that is the UK game on the tv!  Go Cats!)

What an amazing transformation!  We are beyond pleased with the way it turned out and feel it adds so much warmth to the room.  It really brings the shelves to life and now we're anxiously awaiting Abby's design touch so that we can style away!

And as an added bonus, here's a picture of our drapes that were finally hung a couple of weeks ago.  If I've learned one thing in the 2 months we've lived in this house, you don't mess with plaster unless you know what you're doing!  I'm happy to say we've found an expert and it's neither of us!

Stay tuned for more reveals!  Next up is the new sofa with fun pillows that tie the space together!