Living Room Re-do

In the past year, I've redone my kitchen, my dining room (2 different links there so you can see the rearranging of furniture and the new color!), and Curly Girl's bedroom (which you can see here along with her birthday celebration).  Which meant my living room was looking pretty drab.  Kind of beige walls, nail holes from previous owners and where I had moved pictures, no real sense of design.

Driving me crazy, it was.

So we did this:

The lighting is BAD here, really bad, and I somehow don't have a better before picture.  But we went from beige-y blahness to fresh pineapple.  A bright yellow, not too bright.  Honestly, not really my color, but looks awesome with the rest of the house.

We have this little side area in our living room I call the "office offshoot."  It needed something more than just a coat of paint.  So after 2.5 weeks of trying tons of different things, we went with just nice big diamonds.  It honestly makes me wish I would've done it on another wall too (the one our front door is on), but it gives this nice area a sense of purpose and design.  AND this is a better representation of our actual wall color throughout the living room.

 And then I decided to decorate.  So using a technique my friend taught me (scrapbook letters on canvas, paint over, pull off the letters), I made this sign with a fantastic Tommy Boy quote to hang in the middle of the 22 (yes TWENTY TWO) family pictures I had printed for the wall.

 This is my new favorite room in the house.  Our hallway.  I had to completely clean it out to paint, which meant the million boxes waiting to go up to the attic, had to go.  And the toys by the bedroom doors had to go.  And it had to be vacuumed after I finished pulling all the nails out of the walls (pulling out original lathe and plaster with them) and then plastered all the holes.
Anyway, I painted it the same fresh pineapple as the living room (this hallway is off our dining room, but you can see it from the living room), using the same marshmallow white as the diamonds above to paint white frames on the wall to give me my own little version of an art gallery.
You can barely see it, but on the right hand wall, above most of the pictures (which are all family shots of siblings and parents with some old dating and college things thrown in) is the beginning of the Ferris Bueller quote "Life moves pretty fast...." I free-hand painted that on the wall with acrylic paint and a tiny paint brush.  It isn't quite centered in its square, which might drive Mr. Curly crazy.  But I found out when trying to scrub off the crayon I had used for practice, that the blue acrylic will wash off pretty easy.  So we might fix it in a week or two.

So. Living room and hallway done.  Now I'm just trying to convince Mr. Curly that we've had the same bathroom design/linens/color for six years and we should redo it.  And pull the wallpaper out of our bedroom.
But maybe I should give him a break from changes first.