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I guess starting this painting project has home renovations on my mind.

I’m even dreaming about renovation plans!

Woke up this morning thinking about the living room and what could be done to make it a more useful as well as livable room.

It’s a long room (24′!) that has a fireplace flanked by two storage/shelf areas at one end and a triple wide window at the other. One of the long walls is broken up by the doorway into the master suite. The other side has an open space into the foyer, a two foot solid wall that is the coat closet then a half wall with lattice work over it separating the living area from the kitchen. This chopped up configuration makes it a very difficult room to configure furniture groupings in.  I currently have the t.v. catty corner on the wall the windows are on to minimize blocking the view and also to keep glare off the screen from said windows. I have a love seat set at right angles to the wall that has the doorway to the master suite in it and Ken’s desk with his computer is on the other side of the doorway on that same wall. The other wall has a bank of dog crates and the couch is set to wall off the foyer from the living room. Taji’s cage is in front of the windows as he enjoys watching the wildlife and interacting with the dogs and us.

In my dream, I saw us ripping out that fireplace and the two storage units that are one either side of it that just accumulate junk and dust. That will give us 2-3 more feet of space for furniture and I would turn Ken’s desk so that it was angled across the corner and facing outwards instead of looking at the wall as it currently is, then add a couple of club chairs in front of it so we can have intelligent conversations while he messes around on his computer. His desk is large enough that I could even set my laptop on a corner of it and we could surf the net in tandem Now isn’t that romantic??

The half-wall with a lattice above it gives a corner to the kitchen area. This corner is another junk accumulator and would be better used in another manner. Since we don’t have a dining room table, I would like to remove the lattice work and convert the half wall to a bar with a couple of comfortable bar stools on the kitchen side so we could sit there and watch t.v. while eating. The crates can be re-configured to sit underneath the bar overhang or moved into what is supposed to be the dining room but which currently serves as an area I groom and keep puppies in.

Lighting in that room is another thing I have issue with. It has the windows which are shaded by the porch roof, so it’s indirect light that comes in them. There are also skylights on the opposite side of the windows, but those are giving us problems now with leaking especially during heavy rain storms and are scratched and dirty, so don’t let as much light in as they did when new. Ken wants to remove them when the house is re-roofed in the next couple of months, but there we go with dark rooms again — something that is just anathema to me! There is one light fixture hanging from the beam that bisects the room about where the door to the master suite is. Since it hides where the two halves of the home are joined, the beam pretty much has to stay, but the ceiling fan/light fixture hanging from it can be removed and light fixtures with or without ceiling fans can be placed in each “half” of the ceiling. Adding a couple of floor lamps will help as well. I have some table top lamps which are fine for reading, but not so much for lighting the room.

So, it’s no wonder I woke up tired this morning! Dreaming of all those renovations was a lot of mental work! What’s going to be even harder is convincing Ken to do it

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