Before and after...

And finally, we have some before and after shots. This is the living room that we saw when we made a bid on the house. Here it is after paint and crown moulding (generously put up by friends) and the removal of the other people's furniture. Martha Stewart I am not, but I like this better...

Oh yeah, the top picture is after we took off the wooden stripping from the top and sides of the fireplace. We replaced the stripping with something thinner and painted it to match the walls.

This is the dining room before we turned it into a play room. As you can see, they weren't using it as a dining room, either. And I'm going to replace the flowers in the frame on the wall in there. Eventually. When I get to a place with posters.

This is another view of the living room. I especially like this view now that the curtains are gone, gone, gone. We also replaced the chandelier.

The former owners really loved them some audiovisual equipment. We got a magazine here not long ago for church sound engineers. Hmmm. Now we're letting the sunshine in...

Note: the point of this post is not to diss the former homeowner's style of decorating. It wasn't me, and I really didn't like some things they did or didn't do, but it was functional for their family, and they liked it. I stopped reading a rather popular blog lately because of a post where she trashed decorating that she didn't like, and if the pictures had been of my house, I would've been mortified by what some of the commenters said about those pictures, encouraged by the blogger's snark.

Who knows? Some of your may prefer these before pictures. I can take it. =) I do like how much natural light I get in here in the mornings. This house has a lot of nice lighting. And in case you're worried, our neighbor's houses sit far back up a hill. We can't see in their windows at night, so I don't think they can see in ours.