"The church" part one

This will be a long post so I have decided to break it into two, or possibly three different ones.

Our living room is kind of special. It has a very high ceiling, and an indoor balcony. This creates a very open and unusual room, but it is not very practical, because the balcony can not really be used for anything. My father baptised it "the church" because of the high ceiling and the balcony, and since then it has been our inofficiall name for the room. We just have to remember not telling people that we will be having dinner before the TV in the church. 

When we moved in it was mostly natural wood. This is what it looked like in the prospect.

Seeing the pictures makes me kind of nostalgic, but it is really not my style. The sofa looked so small in the corner and there was no balance to the room and it was all really dark (a lot darker than in the pictures).

Below is our sofa which is a bigger one. It looked better, but still not  good.

For a long time I pondered how to best make the ceiling white. It is so high that we could not reach it and painting seemed quite hard (especially considering all the branches in the wood - we were afraid that these would show through in a couple of years). We considered putting up one of those premade ceilings on top of the wood, but it seemed kind of sad to cover that nice ceiling.

In the end I convinced my father-in-law and a painter friend of his that it would look better in white and so we went at it. They brought a  big scaffold and began painting.

Here is Darling taking down the ceiling fixtures.

And this is my doing my part. I did paint quite a lot, but there was a major difference in tidiness between where I had been and where the professional painter had been. Oh well...

After one coat it looked like this. I love shabby chic, but not on a ceiling.

We also removed the rail, originally to make it easier to paint.

It was kind of scary being up there without that rail. Funny what a psycological difference it makes to know that it is or is not there.

I will show you the after pictures in a later post, but I am sure you can already guess what color we chosed.