So, I thought I would add another weekly type of post…home decorating!  Another love of mine.  We love COLOR and when we moved into our house it was pretty much cream.  That is, of course, with the exception of all the wallpaper that we didn’t really notice when we looked at the house.  Ugh…way, way too much wallpaper.

It took us a while to get most of the rooms painted.  Brian did the lion’s share of taking off the wallpaper and then I painted.  We still have more wallpaper to take down, and I think that is this summer’s project.  We try to do one room a year…hopefully, we will be done in the next few years.

Here is the library, that I got a few comments on.  This is one of my favorite rooms.  It is warm and inviting and the kids play in here all the time.  It is one of two rooms on the first floor that has carpet, so it gets a lot of use by the kids. 

We both love the idea of old libraries with all the warm wood tones, the leather chairs and fireplaces.  Of course we didn’t have a fireplace so that was clearly out of the look…and we couldn’t afford to put in a bunch of wood built-in bookcases, so this is what I came up with.

This room took me three days to paint.  It has a basecoat in a brown/burgundy color, then I went over that sponge painting with a forest green, the basecoat again, and then a gold metallic paint sparingly.  After that was all done I drew some freehand art on the wall with the gold, outlined in green.  I also made the window treatments.

I also painted the 4 bookcases in the room.  They were all cheapo Walmart/Target mismatched bookcases.  I painted most of them this dark green color and then with gold paint, I painted Celtic symbols that I traced on them.  Just a smidge time-consuming. 😉

The furniture we bought at different times.  The lovely armoire we bought at a warehouse sale from a local builder that builds luxury homes.  He was selling his model furniture.  The leather chairs and lamps were from a closeouts warehouse store.  Then the lovely oriental rug we saw and knew it would just pull everything together in the room.

One of my favorite finds were the window seats/toy boxes.  We had been looking high and low for toy boxes that looked nice for the library since most of their downstairs toys are in that room.  I found these at Target.  They have holes in the sides and hinges that make the covers stay up.  I don’t think they were intended to be toy boxes, but they have all the safety features you need.  I also love that they don’t look like toy boxes and they provide extra seating for the room.  Perfect!

The kids have their own bookcase, of course:

Most of the room decor items I purchased at different times.  The pictures we purchased at a local Renaissance Faire from the artist, Ruth Thompson.  We have many of her pictures in our house.  As you could probably tell, we are fantasy buffs.  There are fairies, knights, dragons and some real swords in our house.

We have our own unique style! 🙂