family room + outside

I've been giving a tour of our new home and projects. You can catch up my previous posts here: kitchen + living room and bedrooms + bathrooms and stairs + hallways + laundry + offices

We've come to the last room in the house--our family room! This was the last room we saw in the house, and if I had to pick one room that made us want to buy the house it was this one. Everyone that saw the house said the same thing, "this is a cool room."

This room had a total of five lights. It also had acoustic tile. This really was a hard decision. The acoustic tile did a lot to dampen the sounds from upstairs, and it was in great shape. It wasn't hokey at all. But we just had to have more lights. 

So we started pulling off the tiles and oh boy was there a lot of mouse poop up there. And then, and THEN (this still makes me shudder) we found at least 21 dead mice in the ceiling. I had to leave. And I'm sorry for the photo, but I have to.

We think we found their access point--a copper pipe from the old air conditioning system. It had been cut off outside and cut off inside, but hadn't been sealed. It was a mouse runway! We haven't see any mice since, so we think we have resolved the issue for now. 

Just another note about lighting...I said we have a strong love for can lights. But that doesn't mean we like our house being lit up like a runway all the time. If you're doing lots of can lights, it makes a lot of sense to put them in different zones, and to put them on dimmers. All of our can lights are on dimmers, and almost all of the room have multiple zones. I love my dimmers so much.

Since the whole ceiling was down, Jayson figured...what the heck? Lets wire the whole room for speakers! We went with a local company called Big Fish Automation. They did a great job with our speakers--four of the eight are in the ceiling and you can't hardly see them. The center channel and front speakers are usually mounted flush in the wall, but our wall was a little different so they stick out a little. But the most glorious thing they did was rig up our control 4 unit. All of the televison components (cable box, dvd player, etc) are in our storage room, and we control everything from one simple remote. It looks so clean and its so nice to not have to wrestle with cords or boxes.

We love the pickled cedar walls. The are so warm and cozy.

We felt like the white paint on the fireplace made it stand out too much, so we painted it Benjamin Moore Sea Salt. This was probably the closest match to the walls. We also removed the mantle. Jayson said it was a little too French country for him.

We also ended up painting the shutters too (Benjamin Moore sea salt).

We pulled up the carpet and actually bleached the cement in this room. Our carpet salesman told us the urine crystals could lay dormant in the cement and then start to smell again once it got hot.

Since we knew we'd spend a lot of time on this floor, we picked out the most lush and plush carpet we could find. We love this directionless shag. It is so soft. Laying on it is delightful.

Since we were polishing the concrete in the hallway, we decided to take it down into the bar area too. We put another zone of can lights in at the bar. 

 


 

 Here's the finished room.

There is just something about this room! This is the room where we spend the most time. In here, we play with toys, dance (ballet, hip hop, crazy dancing, ballroom--you name it), do gymnastics, watch movies together, wrestle each other, read books together, create pictures, have tickle wars, pillow fights, and just about anything else.

Gah! That room! We love it so much.


So since we're done inside, I'll show you a little bit of outside. Our house sits on .6 acres, but a majority of it is a pretty steep hill.

This is the front of the house. It has several very mature trees--aspens, an oak, an elm, a plum, japanese maple, and (our favorite) 3 ponderosa pines. It also has low voltage landscape lighting and lots of beautiful rocks.

Our back we have a large patio (partially covered), a deck off the main room and a deck off the master. There is a small grass area off the walk out basement.

We look down onto the high school, and have the best view of the football and baseball fields. It's a lot of fun to watch games at night. The only problem is we can't see the scoreboard!

We have a mama deer and two babies that live just below us. We have explored a little just below us. There is a small flat area where we've built a few forts and had a few picnics.

Thanks for taking a tour of our house with us!

I said earlier how heartbroken we were when we left Springville. We were very happy there and we loved our friends. We weren't sure we'd find another place that we'd love as much. It's amazing how guided we've felt in our life. We learned after we moved in to this house that there were several people who wanted to buy it. I'm still not even sure how I found it. This is house is everything we would ever want or need. We have plenty of room to grow, we are able to have friends over very comfortably, we love our neighborhood, we think Provo is the coolest community. We think we'll stay for a long, long time.