somebody asked me if the rest of my house was as interesting as my bedroom. i've done absolutely nothing with the kitchen yet, and the bathroom is in its planning stages. however, the living room is pretty much the way i want it, so here's the tour. I hope some of you are inspired by this. i know i have been by some of the stuff i've seen here. you guys are every bit as insane as i am, and that rocks.
step through the front doo and close it behind you. the first thing you'll see looking forward is this:
hanging on the wall is a print of some cubist impressionist type artist. i got it at a staff sale where i work. the plant is fake. i love fake plants because they don't die, look great, and can be easily hosed off making cleaning a snap. the red on the walls isn't as bricky as the picture looks. i use 10 watt flourescent bulbs and they kind of have a yellow cast. those dots on the wall are the same sort you'll find on the side of a 7up can. i used a poster board pattern i made with a circle cutter to paint them on the wall.
look upwards and you'll see this:
i can't claim responsibility for the geometry of the house, but the red and white shapes it creates are cool.
a little more to the left is this:
that's a painting that my ex did. i found a nice frame for it and created the matching peices on either side for it. i used rectangular peices of lexan from home depot to make them. i laid them over some rocks and chunks of stuff then took a mapp gas torch to them so they would slump down into the weird shapes in the negative space. holding the heat over the same area for a second resulted in these kickass bubbles in the plastic. then i painted the back with a can of that metal texture krylon. the flowery looking things on the front of them are actually melted shopping bags. the torch shrunk them right up into a weird solid flowery shape. it also bonded it to the lexan so i didn't need to glue.
turn your head to the right and:
you can see my ikea dining area. i refinished the top of the table in bright white krylon for plastics. the finish has held up nicely so it works if anyone wants to try that on theirs. i didn't want an off white table on a bright white wall. that's a poster of darth vader and obewan doing thier light saber thing on the wall. its an original freebie poster from 1978. the fake tree came from that same staff sale as the picture earlier. i gaot three of them for like $30 bucks. you should have seen me stuff them all in the trunck of my old corolla.
continuing in a rightward direction....
i built this entertainment center with some pretty cheap plywood i got. i wasn't worried too much about the knotholes because plaster is amazing stuff. the bottom, outside edges, and tops are the same bright white as the walls. the insides and front are flat black. i've got my sixaxis controllers dangling upside down over the ps3 using a pair of chargers i bought at walmart. i hot glued the bottoms to the inside top of the cubby so they would hang there like that. i used some black conduit to keep all the wires neet and i actually tore into the wall and migrated a power outlet and cable jack to the part of the wall directly behind the tv. no wires to be seen anywhere.
if you look closely you can see the motherboard of my living room computer glowing under the blacklight behind the little window here:
the computer is built into the entertainment center. you can access the rear panel by removing the hatch with the silver drawer handles. the computer's front panel protrudes just slighty through the right side of the cabinet, so its easy to turn it on and put in a dvd or game or something. the tv also has a few windings of red ropelight behind it to make it float on the wall a little.
step back into the dining area and you can see the whole room:
the couch is old and ugly, so i used a cover i found at wally world. its really soft and washing machine freindly. it also matches the room wonderfully. that's a red shag area rug and parson's table, and one of those cube ottoman's with the storage inside. that's where i keep all the millions of dollars i save by making all of my own crap. the lamps are made from three sizes of pvc pipes. each of them holds a 10 watt flourescent bulb. that doesn't seem like a lot, but its great for watching tv.
walk back towards the door and you see the shelf i made:
the problem with sectionals like my couch is they have a rounded back which creates wasted space. sure you could stick a tochier light back there with a built in lava lamp, but i decided to make a shelf with a top that curves around with it. its made entirely from plywood and 1 x 12's. i used some flexible molding to sort of fit the curve of the shelf to the back of the courch, since the couch is somewhat uneven due to its age. because the top is curved around and the shelf by the door is only a foot deep, there's a cavity behind the back of the couch and under the top of the shelf. its the perfect place for the subwoofer. i placed it back there and the two rear speakers on top and ran the wires behind the couch. i have tile floors so a peice of foam was used under the sub.
and that's about it.
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