One More Step in Lightening Up the Living Room

At ‘Our House’ in the great room, which is the living room area combined with the kitchen area, we built a partial wall to divide the space just enough to block the kitchen counter  and sink area from the living room side. Then at a later time we ‘cut’ off about 4’ of counter and cabinet on the peninsula to allow a more open walkway…and to give us room to build a pantry closet on the wall to the right. (I’ll get into that a little more in a later post, but here’s a glimpse.)

This picture was from a long time ago…right after I had painted the living room walls a super  dark green, they actually looked black in the night. But anyway, here you can see the wall on the left with the painting, then the area with the ledge, we built those. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a picture of how this looked originally, you just have to imagine a big huge counter all the way across and a clear view to the back of the sink.) However, in this picture, you can see the peninsula is still really long, where the stools are, that’s what we cut off in phase 2.

Which brings us to this picture, fast forwarded about 10 years or so. This shows it with the present paint color on the walls, ‘Brass Bucket’ and shows it with those 4’ cut off the peninsula. After it was removed, I just had the carpenter add to the ledge wall and build one new ledge for the whole thing.

Now that I’ve given you a little history of the evolution of this space, let me bring you up to speed on the ‘lightening up’ of this area.

I took the bench and moved it to the dining room entry and moved this little gateleg table I had in the back entry to this spot.

Called a gateleg because the leg swings out like a gate, I guess, and holds the leaf top up to enlarge the table.

Then I grabbed some other accessories from around the house to create this little vignette.

The pair of painted glass vases I found at a yard sale last summer.

And this painting was already hanging here with the bench, but now works great with this table too.

Let me tell you what I know about this painting. It’s a signed, original oil, in the impressionist style with a date impressed on the back of the stretcher of 1881. I bought this over 20 years ago, when I just ‘happened’ upon an estate sale, just before it closed. I think no one noticed this little gem because it was hanging on the wall behind where the little lady running the register was seated. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you, she sold it to me for $12.

I’ve gotten a lot of wonderful treasures at sales, but this painting is by far my favorite.

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