Loving the Living Room

No before photos of this one... Way too complicated and a huge project. Very glad that what used to be Gabe's room is now the new living room. The back entrance can get a lot more use, especially with the handicapped ramp as Anna grows. Also, in the summer, Gabe could never play outside because I wouldn't let him go by himself and I wasn't about to hang out in his bedroom keeping an eye on him. Now, it's the living room, so I can keep the door open and the windows up while I work, clean, cook, you know, all that "fun" stuff Mom's get to do during the day!

It looks like we bought a new couch, but it's a new couch cover. I love Ikea couches and their couch covers! It pulls out into the perfect sofa bed for visitors. (Hint, hint!)

We are all decorated for Christmas and it feels oh-so-cozy!

The bookshelves, wall unit and t.v. stand are new, since in our old living room our t.v. was sandwich'ed in between two closets and we had the dorkiest looking t.v. stand. (It reminded me of a wooden extraterrestrial, ya know, E.T.) Manny loves how much the new pieces put together dwarf our flat screen to the size of a peanut, so it's given him lots of incentive to buy himself a bigger t.v. when the time is right. (Like Super Bowl season.) And for any man-readers out there, the surround sound is awesome and booms! according to a very-excited Manny, mostly because there's actually four walls in this room.

Final touch was the feared photo wall, which I've been wanting to do for weeks but Manny has been avoiding for... weeks. Luckily we agreed on this pretty well and it came out looking great. The running joke is that we can tell who hung a frame around this joint by the amount of holes behind it. Manny meticulously measures and pre-sets everything, even dotting the wall with a pencil at the exact point where the nail is going to go. I swear on my "eyeballing" skills and the wall ends up with about 5 or 10 holes before my "skills" find the right one.

Which is exactly why we make such a great team.