Drab to Fab- The Great Living Room Makeover

I’m so excited to say the living room is finally finished! I can’t believe it used to look like this. Dark. Dreary. Sad. SO VERY BROWN. I really wish I’d taken pictures when it still had the wall to wall carpeting and parquet flooring accents!

My aim with this room was to make it feel fresh, bright, cozy, modern, and fun.

I’m not going to write an entire tutorial on how to paint 80’s paneling, because there are plenty of how-to articles on that already. But what’s a blog if you don’t give your opinion? So my process went like this: wash the walls, cut in the grooves, apply two thin coats of a decent primer, caulk gaps, then finish with two thin coats of high quality paint. Whenever I go to buy paint and the prices at the counter make me cringe, I hear my mom in my head saying, “There’s nothing more expensive than cheap paint.” And then I proceed to purchase the good stuff. (Thanks, mom!)

I was texting progress pictures to my sister as I worked, and she lovingly pointed out to me that just by cutting in, I’d already painted about 90% of the entire room by hand. Ouch.

I guess I could have put more effort into just painting the grooves, but it was just easier to do it this way. It all needed to be covered, anyway.

The process for choosing a color for this room was a little out of the ordinary. With all the supply shortages happening lately, I wasn’t able to get any paint samples. My husband and I narrowed it down to a couple we liked by looking at pictures online, then went with Sherwin Williams “Aloof Gray”. (I do realize how catastrophically wrong that could have gone.) For the trim we used Sherwin Williams “Greek Villa”, which is our tried and true, all-time-favorite trim color.

Painting the window trim made the black frames pop and I LOVE IT.

My major takeaway from this project is that painting paneling requires far more effort than I thought. It probably didn’t help that this is the largest room I’ve ever tackled. Regardless, I’m not sure I’m going to have the gumption to paint all the paneling that’s in this house. It was extremely time consuming and frustrating. Even though the end product does look great, I’m thinking some other areas will be waiting until we can throw some drywall up.

There’s still a lot I plan to do as far as decorating, but so far the overall feel of the room is going in the right direction.

I’ll post more soon! Thanks for reading!