Family Room Mantle & Built In Project
Thursday, December 28, 2017
There was a home building floor plan trend (in Utah at least) around the 90's to do a step-down family room from the kitchen. We really, really liked our neighborhood when we were house hunting and after touring quite a few homes realized none had our ideal floor plan so we went with what had the most potential.
So we made a plan to transform our 90's step down living room into a gorgeous place for us to spend time as a family.
It's hard to know what to do with a long room in terms of furnishing it so the entire space is functional, as well as figuring out the focal point. We can't use the longest wall as the focal point because the furniture would block the entrance to the room and the far narrow wall has the fireplace, which is a natural focal point. Check out what I'm talking about here:
Having the back of the sectional face the kitchen was aesthetically no bueno for me. To remedy that I found this cute console table 40% off at World Market and I'm loving it. It doubles as toy storage since we use the odd back part of the room as a play area. This makes the back of our long room feel more intentional.
The fireplace mantle in this room just wasn't doing it for us. The tile was meh and seemed unsubstantial and not to scale in this larger room. Another home in the neighborhood that sold for more than our house even though it was smaller had built-ins in their living room and we liked the look.
Here's a before picture I took Christmas day because I forgot to take one before, sorry about the mess:
Besides a new mantle with built-ins, we're also planning on adding can lights and removing these fixtures because these lights are right in the line of vision from the higher kitchen as you look into the family room.
David- genius that he is- used Google Sketch Up to create a 3-D rendering with all the measurements of what he'll be building. You can see where we got the ideas for this design on the Family Room Inspo Pinterest board. Yes, Joanna Gaines got to us a little and there will be some faux shiplap and marble tile around the fireplace insert. But seriously it's just so pretty.
Here's another picture where you can see the mantle and the sad lights a bit better. David priced out all the materials and the project should cost around $500 (he always says it'll be a little more since he knows there will be things he'll have to fix a bit). It would be at least a couple grand with labor if we outsourced so the savings are amazing.
David did demo on the mantle and surround the day after Christmas and has almost finished building the two side built-ins in the garage. He'll install those and then do the mantle itself. I'm so so so excited about this project, I'm seriously in love with how this room will come together. Basically, I got so stinking lucky to have married David, builder extraordinaire, it's not even funny.
Even more exciting is the fact that I'll probably have a baby in 10 weeks and it should be done well before then because he's making such good progress. I have pictures of David finishing a project while I was laboring with Scotty and I'm not wanting a repeat of that, haha.
Right now all the furniture is stuffed into the pretty front room that is finished but was unfurnished. So the house feels a bit off kilter, but it really worked out that we had another empty living space to just move everything too. If you want real time updates, check out my insta-stories, where David kindly lets me post his projects. He jokes that I owe all my content to him and he's right haha.
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