Home Remodeling Year 3 - Cassie Brady Family Room

We’ve been in our home for three years now and this past summer we finally started tackling a huge/messy project. The ceilings! We chose to start with our family room since it’s the room we use most often.

To see more behind the scenes on this project check out my Instastories. Plus see what our home looked like the day we purchased it here, year 1, and year 2.

Removing The Popcorn

My husband did all the hard work himself scraping the popcorn off the ceilings by hand using a putty scrapper and a disc sander thats original use is to remove paint from the exterior of houses. Having both options kept his arms from getting too tired thanks to the ability to switch back and forth.

One of the hardest parts for my husband was knowing where he left off. After the popcorn is scrapped off they leave behind a little unpainted circle that looks just like popcorn! The smooth surface wasn’t reveled until after we began to paint the ceiling. Once the ceiling was painted we saw a few spots that were missed and he went back a second time to smooth those out.

Paint

After removing the popcorn, my husband and I gave the ceilings and walls a fresh coat of Sherwin Williams Pure White paint. We chose the same color white for the walls as well as the ceilings to make the room brighter (we originally painted our walls gray when we first moved in) and to make the wood trim really pop. We originally thought we would replace all the wood trim, but in the end we decided to work with the existing trim. I prefer things white and bright and the wood trim really helps warm up the space.

Mounting Our Television

Last year we purchased a new TV with the intentions of mounting it above our fireplace. We finally got around to mounting it and it makes the whole room feel much more open. I love it! We originally looked into hiring an electrician to add an outlet above our fireplace, but thankfully my Dad has done this before (he built the home I grew up in) and showed Nathan how to add an outlet himself.

New Light Fixture

Another thing we wanted to change in our family room was this large gold ceiling fan. We preferred something more modern, clean and simple. I knew I wanted a wood fan with three blades and fell in love with this one. I love the chestnut blades with black and silver accents that match our fireplace perfectly.

Gallery Wall

Originally I wanted to add two windows to this side of the room to bring in more natural light, but I’ve decided to keep things simple for now and enlarge our gallery wall instead. The larger gallery wall adds so much life and color to this windowless wall. We added in this large Japanese print (similar here) this year and I hope to add in more art soon.