How I Transformed My Living Room | Before & After

We moved into our new home in July of 2020--right in the middle of the pandemic. It was stressful to say the least, but we're happy with our new home. 

The location is San Clemente in the coast of Southern California. We have about a 10-minute drive and we're on the sand. I've always wanted to be back at the coast as this is where I grew up. I'm inspired by ocean hues, like soft blues and greens. And I tend to use lots of creams and wood tones in my work.

I could see a lot of potential in the house, and we loved the layout. It’s mostly ground floor construction with only a loft upstairs off the kitchen. As we age, not having to climb stairs anymore makes us happy. =0)

So here are some before shots of what we saw when we first toured the home when it was for sale.

And here's the floor plan to give you a bird's eye view of the layout of the whole home. The first thing I did was create a budget for the whole house for everything we wanted to do eventually. And one of the first items we decided to tackle was to replace the flooring. The house had its original tile flooring, which was made of porcelain. Changing your floor is a huge mess. So, you want to do this before you move in, if possible, because you can avoid having to move out again to get the floor done.

Porcelain is very durable and inexpensive as an option for flooring, but I find it to be cold feeling. It was a shocking mess when we saw what they did when they tore up the floor. We added new wood flooring everywhere, except for the bedrooms, two baths, and the laundry room.

The flooring we chose is a French oak with a walnut-colored stain, and very minimal polyurethane finish. The planks are five-inch widths and I think it looks a lot like hickory.

One of the things that bothered me about the living and dining area, which is one large open space, was the arch from the dining room and living room to the kitchen. Also, you had to look from the front door through that archway, and you could see clear to the back of the house, to the family room. And this felt a lot like a bowling alley to me. So, I did two things to counter this bowling alley effect.

1. I turned the direction of the wood in the opening from the living room and dining room onto the kitchen. 

2. And I changed the color scheme from the living dining room to the kitchen.

Another priority for me was to space plan the furniture layout for the whole house before we moved in. This helped me to figure out what I could bring with us and what I could donate or sell ahead of time. 

Here's a sketch of my living and dining room furniture. I was able to use what I already had and not purchase anything new in terms of furnishings. I use a program called SketchUp for my 3D sketches, and then I put them onto my iPad and color them. It helps give me a good sense of the finished room. 

Once we were in and my husband could see all the decorative plans I had for the house, he suggested we do the re-pipe before I got too carried away. This is because in our neighborhood, most of the homes were 20 or 21 years old, and some of them had started to experience pinhole leaks. So, we thought, well, rather than tear up the walls twice, we'll go ahead and do that first.

And since we were going to go ahead and re-pipe, I thought maybe I'll do my electrical changes while the walls are torn up, because this meant a few more holes, 43 holes in all, but that meant only one trip for the drywall guy and one trip for the painter. This meant peace of mind and saving a little bit on the budget with the contractors.

So now all the electrical, all the recess cans are LED and a very nice color temperature. These fixtures had four settings. You can change the Kelvin, (the color temperature) of each fixture. I chose 2,700 Kelvin throughout, which gives a nice warm effect from these lights. 

I think they're making LED fixtures much better than they used to. Used to be everything was blue and made your room feel mushy because the light was a good quality, but nowadays they're much better.

So finally, the walls were patched, and it was time to do some decorating! 

My vision for the living and dining room was to add floor to ceiling wood paneling. I used an old trick of mine, which is to smooth coat the walls entirely with plaster, and then to paint them with a semi gloss finish coat. This fools the eye into thinking they're painted wood. Of course, you'll need plenty of primer first.

Before painting, the carpenter needed to apply the panel molding. This is a tricky math equation when it comes down to it because you need to work with all the obstacles in the room like light switches and outlets and anything decorative. If you had a sconce, something like that would affect your planning of where you place these panels.

I worked with our carpenter for hours to get this right. It's always best to allow extra time for these types of tests, so you can think them through. I used my iPad to start the concepts, and this allowed me to relay my ideas from my head to the carpenter. From this point, the carpenter was then able to map it out in pencil and then apply the panels. This carpenter also did our crown and base moldings at the same time, as well as the window and door casings. Because I was planning to add drapery in these rooms, a part of our math problem was how to make sure the panels were evenly spaced around the future drapery rods. You can see how we were able to avoid light switches and outlets in most cases. Where we couldn't, we made sure they were in the least conspicuous places.

Here's a picture of the new opening from the living dining area to the kitchen. I squared off the opening to the kitchen. And coupled with the painted walls, there was now more separation between spaces when first entering the house.

You can see that Bella is probably wondering what the heck happened to her new home.

So next came the decorative window treatments and decorative light fixtures, the chandelier, and the pendant over the front door. I could splurge a little bit because I had planned this out of my budget, and I knew my bottom line. I felt comfortable with this decision.

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Here are my light fixtures selections. One is a chandelier over the dining table and the other is the lantern at the front door. Since we don't have a formal entry, this helps to establish a feeling of an entry hall and adding smaller zones within one large area helps to make the room feel cozier.

Here are a few after pictures of how the room turned out.

I hope you enjoyed the before and after tour of my home. ❤️

Here's a quick review of my tips about this project:

1. Plan by using a budget. You can splurge if you know the bottom line before you purchase anything new.

2. Make a furniture plan, so you'll know what's going to fit ahead of your move date. 

3. Do as much demo as you can ahead of moving in. 

4. Consider major plumbing and electrical projects ahead of decorating. 

5. Consider tricks like plaster and paint for the wood paneled look to save on costs. 

6. Map out your changes using an iPad or pen and paper and communicate these to your contractors. 

7. Think about sidelines and obstacles on your walls. 

Thanks for visiting and I'll see you next week!

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