Den, Before and After!

Ok, back to the house renovations!

Our den didn't need a ton of work when we bought our house, be we definitely knew that we wanted to give it a serious makeover.  This room is where the TV lives and where we spend a considerable amount of time, so we wanted it to be warm and comfortable and well-suited for entertaining.  The very first step, like with all the rooms in the house, was to remove the carpeting.  Then we also removed the hideous ceiling fan, which was promptly donated to the ReStore.  Obviously somebody thought that fan was a good idea at some point, so hey, maybe some new person will wander into the ReStore sometime soon and just be thrilled to find such an item for their future home upgrades.  Power to 'em.

While I am not at all opposed to the use of yellow on interior walls, it just didn't seem to be the right color for this room.  We get a lot of natural light through the windows during the day time, and the yellow just seemed a bit too much.  Plus, we are using pretty bold colors in much of the house already, so we decided that neutral tone would be nice in the den.  We chose a light shade of brown that is sort of coffee colored, and I love it.  Then we hung a new ceiling fan and some new blinds, and it was starting to look like a new room!

Unlike most of the house, which is subfloor, this room was a later addition and has a concrete slab floor.  We left the concrete floor exposed for quite some time while we worked on other parts of the house, but once the summer came around and we started thinking about planning a house-warming party, we decided it was time to do something about the floors.  Originally, we had thrown around the idea of redoing this floor with brick pavers.  I still think that this would have looked very cool, but in the end we decided to keep up with the Saltillo tile.  We played around with different patterns for a few days, and finally settled on using octagonal tiles.  One paycheck out the window and two trips to the tile store, and we had our tile!  Then came the fun part.

After we got the tiles home, we played around a bit with how to lay the tiles within the space we had in the room.  It's a big room, so we definitely were glad to be using a relatively simple pattern compared to what we did in the kitchen.  Josh had the idea to put a thin border around the room, which would allow us to have accents in the triangular shapes that were created by halving some of the square spacer tiles.  We both agreed that we liked this style of accents better than having random colored tiles throughout the room, so we ran with it.  And I swear we had some serious luck with this room, because after laying out a couple of rows of tiles on the dry floor to figure out our spacing, we realized that we would not have to cut one single octagonal tile in order to fit everything evenly between the borders!  We couldn't have planned that better even if we had tried.

Josh and I figured out our own system of tiling pretty quickly while we were working on the floors in the kitchen/laundry/bathroom (I still need to do a detailed post on the tiling process), and with this room we really dialed this in.  We're like professionals now!  My job is to lay all the tile, including cutting everything to size.  Then after the entire floor is laid out, Josh is in charge of grouting.  I started laying tile in this room on a Saturday afternoon, and by the following weekend we had the whole room grouted and ready for the baseboard tiles and sealant.  I'm pretty proud of us.  And it looks damn good.

So, before and after (!):

Quite the improvement, eh?  It really is amazing how much new flooring can completely change a room.  We've got some pretty rugs and some colorful furniture and this room is now fully functional as a cozy hangout for us and our pups and our guests.  I love it.

On a side note, from the time we very first looked at this house, I had said that I really wanted to install in fireplace in this room.  We looked into a local company that manufactures kiva fireplaces, and we were almost ready to pull the trigger on purchasing a corner kiva fireplace to go opposite the windows in here.  While I still desperately would love to have a kiva fireplace (the house currently has no fireplace at all), we decided that in the scheme of things that we wanted to put money/effort into right now with the house, adding a fireplace was not at the very top of our priority list.  So, it may happen sometime in the next couple of years, or it may not. In the meantime, we have a 60" television that can easily project a nice big (and smoke-free!) fire if I get too nostalgic, and we'll probably be constructing a firepit of some kind in the backyard this fall.