White Walls Transforms the Look of Our Family Room

by Donna Powell

2 Materials

$300

4 Weeks

Medium

After months of renovating our family room, we can finally say we have completely transformed the look of the room. And the biggest change was as simple as painting the walls a bright white color.

white walls transforms the look of our family room

Our home is a mid-century modern home the has at least ten different roofs peaks and rooms that extend out from the front of the home at different angles. Our family room is one of those unique rooms. The ceiling in the family room start at 17 feet and slope down to 10 feet. The room also had dark rough sawn wood paneling that was nearly all black. It gave the room a cave like feel. It would have been very popular in the 1970's when the house was built.

Even the ceiling was covered in the same dark black paneling with light colored beams. After some extensive damage to our home from a tree, we had to replace the roof and the skylights in this room. Which also lead to finding rotten wood in the floors and behind the walls around the large windows. A full renovation and repair work had to be done in this room!

After having the skylights replaced, custom windows installed, the floors repaired and laminate flooring installed, we started the tedious job of painting the black paneling. We used a combination of spray painters, and very long poles to apply three coats of primer and two coats of bright white paint in Moon Beam from Behr. This took several weekends to complete.

The end result is now a bright room with a modern industrial style and lots of natural light from the new skylights and large windows on each side of the fireplace.