Multifunctional Familyroom
The first time my husband and I looked at this house was 12 years ago when my mom was selling real estate. The weeds were overgrown all the way around the house and my grandpa, who was in his 80’s, somehow lost his keys trying to pull them. We never did find them. My husband was drawn to the two outbuildings — chicken house and huge red barn. But I wasn’t sold on the house. And when we realized that the former homeowners had taken the furnace and all the duct work with them, Brad wasn’t sold on the house either. A few months later the bank dropped the price low enough that we cut our Florida vacation short to come home and make an offer.
We spent months getting our new home liveable and after we moved in we slowly worked through renovating and customizing each room to suit our growing family. The living room was way too small. I knew that before we even moved in. So we made plans to take down the wall–even though it had a chimney in it.
They started in the attic and ended in the basement–4 floors of brick. I’m a scavenger. I talked Brad into saving those bricks and just a couple years ago I fashioned a brick sidewalk with them.
About 5 years after we moved in, Brad had talked me into ditching our artificial Christmas Tree and purchasing a real one. The second year we had one, we discovered a crack in the tree base — after it was too late. All of the water we had poured into it had leaked out underneath our carpet and buckled our wood floor. Since we were going to have to tear out the flooring, we decided it was a good time to install
a gas log fireplace. The day after Christmas we ditched the tree, tore out the carpet and fixed the floor. Then over the next month I designed the fireplace wall and cabinetry.
At the time, I was working from home with five kids so I wanted as much storage as I could get. So I built cabinets the same height of the fireplace with solid doors to store the ugly, unorganized mess and glass doors at the top for our electronics and a few pretty things. Antique brick on the face of the fireplace was an easy choice since we had tore the same style out of the house.
The living room still isn’t huge so we maximized the seating with a long sectional. We can all fit comfortably with a few icecream buckets full of popcorn during movie night. The coffee table is awesome space for games and kid activities. I designed and built it with two drawers on each side that are packed with notebooks, playing cards, and crayons.
