House Tour: The Living Room

So, for the first  in six years of our marriage Joel and I were living rented apartments and houses.  The walls were white and since we were on the every two year plan we just kept our free and hand-me-down furniture. 
Well, we are still renting.  (We will probably be moving again in another 4-5 years and with this market that just isn't long enough for us to justify buying.  We don't want to have to sell it and we don't want to be landlords.)  But, the house we are rented feels like it is a home more than most of our apartments ever did.  The family that lived here before didn't paint the entire house white before moving out, so there was color on the walls.  They also told us to make it our own home, so we could paint whatever we wanted.  (I'll show pictures of our room in another blog post--I'm waiting on one finishing touch before I do it.  But, they actually painted our bedroom the color of our choosing before we moved in.  They were going to repaint it anyway with the help of a hired contractor.  So, we got to choose the color.) Okay, so no white walls. 
The next thing to make it feel a little more like a real grown-up home was to get rid of our college furniture.  Both sets of my grandparents and my aunt and uncle gave us money for our wedding to put toward furniture.  My siblings actually got pieces for their wedding, but they owned a home and were not moving.  Joel and I didn't know where we were going when we got married, so we had put the money in a CD to wait until we were a little more established before getting any nice new furniture.  We decided to use the money with this house.  We will be here four/five years at least and probably only move one more time.  So, we went to Art Van and found some couches and tables we liked for a living room set.  It was very exciting--the best part is that everything was in the clearance center, so it was a great deal!  Well, here are some pictures from our grown up living room:

From the front door (we painted the maroon wall)

The maroon accent wall

Our living room from the opposite corner--you can see the front door and the door into the kitchen.

This is a piece of drift wood that Joel found on the beach.  He was hiding it from me for a while.  Then I found it and told him that it may make a good shelf.  Ta-da!

A few pictures from painting:

Before

Joel painted that large amount in the same time I painted that small corner.  I was following the painting book instructions; he was not.