Functional & Modern Front Room Makeover - Making Home

Welcome to our series Making Home where I makeover my newly renovated house into my dream home! If you haven’t seen the previous episodes where I demo my house, go through renovations and finally start decorating then you need to check out our playlist here. I totally transformed my basement bathroom, refreshed my kitchen, made over my bedroom, and completed my upstairs rental unit. This next makeover is my front room makeover, which is where I’ll be entering my house every day and storing shoes and coats! Check out how this space looked before:

BEFORE

The inspo for this room includes painting my fireplace green, using neutral tones, and creating some faux built-in storage to make it a lot more functional. 

First up, I decided to cover over the ugly original tile on my fireplace with some Durabond 90 plaster, adding splotches around the other parts of the fireplace as well so that it would match the texture. Then I painted the whole thing green to match the other colours of my home. This already made a HUGE difference, but I finished up this wall by adding two light sconces, and a big rounded square mirror above the mantel.

Next I tackled the storage situation. I installed a massive bench/storage solution that is DIY’d from IKEA kitchen cabinets. I have a whole video on this process if you want to see how it was done! I also installed a DIY coat rail with pegs and a shelf, and then had my friend Chris from Woodchip Werks make me a completely custom tambour walnut cabinet and floating shelf that is the perfect size for my small space. Thanks Chris!

For some finishing touches I added a rug, DIY’d a roll-down blind with linen fabric and a dowel, and then painted the door and door frame to be a darker greige colour so that it would pop. Check out my completed front room makeover!

AFTER

This room makeover literally took me 6 months to do and there were so many ups and downs to get it to the place where it is today, so check out the video below to watch the amazing journey from start to finish!