One upside to waiting a few months to show you our finished(ish) sunroom makeover is that I can tell you how we’re liking it after living with it for a bit…which is a lot.

Here it is now!

The sunroom has been, alternately, a great hang out space for us and a big PITA to deal with. It’s slightly awkwardly tacked on to the back of the house, connected to the kitchen on one side and the den on the other, with an exterior door that leads out to the back porch/deck and backyard.

It’s gone through a few iterations over the years, from general living area/hang out space:

To playroom:

and now back to general living area/hang out space now that Abe is bigger (look how little he was!)

That leather couch was third hand when we got it, and it hung out there a good long while, but it was finally all done. So the first order of business was finding a replacement (well, the VERY first order of business was dealing with getting that old couch out to the road so it could be picked up). Facebook marketplace came through in a big way here, and we found this new couch for $80. It’s in very good shape structurally, pretty good shape aesthetically, and super comfortable.

Behind the sofa, note that we have some new windows in here, too! I mean, you probably can’t tell they’re new. There’s still a mix of old windows and new windows, because they’re huge and really expensive to replace, so we’re gradually replacing the ones that most desperately need it. Anyway, I can tell they’re new, and they make me happy. Also note the curtain rods still up above the windows. We used to have gray velvet curtains in here and didn’t want to take the rods down yet in case the sun was heating things up too much in summer and we wanted the option of rehanging them. Eventually we’d like to get bamboo blinds in here, but for now we’re just soaking up all the light.

The bargain sofa allowed me to splurge on the Ruggable rug, which, along with the neutral sofa, inspired the color palette in here, which is all the colors. We lost two earlier rugs in here to assorted mostly pet related issues, so I’m hoping to avoid that this time. We have a Ruggable in our trailer that we love and have washed many times with no issues. This one is HUGE, but Ruggable swears it will fit in a regular washer. Honestly, I haven’t needed to wash it yet, so we’ll see.

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Fancy fireplace is still hanging out here being fancy. But I moved the fancy lady who used to live here to our library, over the piano (also a fancy enough place for her, I think) and ordered these Cavallini cactus and gemstones posters from Amazon. Along with these magnetic poster frames. They were super inexpensive, and I was worried they would look that way, but I love them. All the colors!

Remnants of playroom remain, as our lego table has found a home here as well as Abe’s puppet theater.

And not everything is new by any means. If I were going to repaint, I’d probably go with white in here, but I didn’t repaint for now, and I’m not sure I don’t still prefer the very subtle aqua-ish Benjamin Moore Blue Bonnet.

The toy cabinet also remains, along with a gallery of seascapes:

Cats and other animals really enjoy comfy sofa:

Now looking back in the other direction (toward the kitchen):

We had a table in here in pre-playroom days and used it quite a bit, so I was excited to get one for the space again. This is the DIY plywood table that was formerly in our basement movie room. The idea was we would play games down there, but that didn’t happen a ton, so we decided to try moving it up here. I’ve also always loved this table and wanted it to be somewhere where it would get seen and used more. And it gets used a TON up here, even though we have a table in the kitchen right next door and in the dining room right next door to the kitchen. I guess we can never have too many tables.

I took this picture of Abe doing school to show you how the table actually looks most of the time:

And the chairs! We had some mid-century chairs that I’d painted black down in the basement with this table, but black didn’t fit with my all the colors theme, so I went looking for something different. And I found these green velvet chairs on Facebook. They’re still for sale on Wayfair, if you’re interested in your very own velvet chairs.

And then there was the matter of cabinets. We used to have a big chunky (HEAVY) dresser here, but it didn’t hold as much as it seemed like it should, and it was kind of falling apart. So we smashed it with a sledgehammer (well, we disassembled it as much as possible first) and dragged it outside, too. Because it wasn’t in good enough shape to donate and I remember vividly how hard it was to get IN to the sunroom in one piece back in the day.

I’m not thrilled with the replacement we found, but it will do for now. We got these at Aldi (apparently they’re famous! These little Aldi cabinets), and they’re fine but not especially exciting AND I want something that holds more stuff. We have so much stuff (I use these mostly for craft supplies, but would like room for some books and games, too). And it’s a really big space, so we could easily have something bigger here. But I couldn’t find what I wanted, and even more than big enough cabinets I wanted to be able to put all the stuff from the dresser somewhere and call the room finished for now.

 

And so we are indeed calling it finished! And we’re using it constantly. We have so many rooms here in this boxy house (as opposed to a lot of open space that flows together) that it’s always my fear that I’ll expend a lot of energy on one and we’ll never use it, particularly as we have fewer and fewer kids at home (MILO is off at college this year, too! So down to 2 at home full time). But this has become basically a school room by day (which we used to do in the dining room and still do some, but having the table in proximity to a comfy couch is nice for school) and then just another place to sit/play games/etc. in the evenings. And we can look out the big windows at the chickens in the yard!