New Bookscase in Front Entrance

I was kindly reminded by one of my friends recently that I have not been sharing pictures of what we have done to our house in Arkansas.  Some of you might be curious to see what we have come up with to make our "new to us" more to suit our tastes.  Here is one of the first projects that David and I have completed. 

 

 

The front entrance was nice.  It has a brick floor, a wall of bookcases, and light colored pineapple wallpaper with a pineapple border.  The wallpaper was in a light grey color.  I liked the grey color, not the wallpaper.  The bookcase was very thin.  It was build to hold hardback novels and paperbacks.  It was not build to hold engineering books, photo albums, and other large sized books.  When I unpacked our books and placed them in the bookcase the edges were hanging over the edge of the bookcase a good 2 - 3 inches.  Very, very irritating!

 

 

So David decided to rip out the old book case and build a brand new one.  The shelves on the left and right are in the same position as the old bookcase.  In the center he build new shelves.  He did a great job!  Of course it is my job to take down all of the wall paper and paint walls, trim and shelves.  I even had to paint the ceiling! The ceiling runs from the dining/living room into the front entrance without a break.  The last owner decided to update the dining/living room by painting the ceiling beige (yuck!).  She stopped rolling around the doorway to the front entrance.  You could see the roller marks from the beige ceiling paint on the old white ceiling!  Horrible!  So guess what I got to do?  Paint both the dining/living room and front entrance ceilings!  JOY!  It did turn our really nice though.  A lot of light is reflected through both rooms and it seems to make the front of the house really cheerful.

 

David installed two new lights in the ceiling in front of the bookcase.  It brightens everything up.

 

We have a lot of books!  I didn't count how many boxes of books we had when we moved.  They were everywhere!  I have tried to arrange some of our pictures and souvenirs from our trips on the shelves.  I probably will be moving them around a bit until everything looks just right.

When I was painting the walls I had thought about painting the space above the bookcase the same color as the walls, Weimaraner by Benjamin Moore .  Since our ceilings are 8 ft I wanted the bookcase to appear taller so we went with the trim color Winter Snow by Benjamin Moore.  It is a white paint with a hint of blue in it.  I loved it in my last house and am going to use it in this house too.

Of course we put up some of David's photographs.  We have to show them off somewhere so we put the one of Notre Dame on one wall and the Eiffel Tower on the other wall.  We actually had to replace Eiffel Tower print.  It was printed on some type of box style, you will have to ask David what is was.  The movers ended up crushing the corners and scratching some of the black along the edge.  David was not very happy with the print so he ordered a new one printed on metal.  It looks really great.

The lights on either side of the picture were brass and not our style.  I painted them with black satin spray paint.  The lamp shades are currently too small.  I have a really great idea planned for them, but I shall wait and share it with you later.

So there is our foyer.  I will start working on my other posts of the kids bathroom to share soon.  Hope that you enjoyed it!