I was wondering what that was on the ceiling.

I'm sorry, but I just don't think you could make that red carpet work. Green walls would just draw more attention to it. I would even rip it out and live with stained concrete if I couldn't afford to replace it.

Removing the wallpaper from the ceiling will go a long way toward improving the room! Not sure about leaving the beams as is vs. painting them white. Depends on how you want the room to feel -- denlike or light and airy? Finally, if you're trying to deemphasize the red carpet, don't paint the walls green! Green will just enhance the red (opposite colors on the color wheel). Do you know if maybe there's hardwood under the carpet? The only thing I will say about replacing the carpet is that it is so much easier to do before you're settled in!

Congratulatons- it's a fantastic room- those windows, wow!

i would remove the wall paper on the ceiling and paint the entire room white. I would leave the beams and trim stained-so pretty!

As far as the carpet, what would you put eventually? How do you feel about natural fiber rugs? maybe you can get a few jute area rugs to cover up the most visible spots.

Boy would I love to get my hands on that room. First you need to look under the carpet to see whats there. I would take out the carpet first and foremost. Even if I had to paint the floor. I just couldn't live with somebody elses "stuff" (for better lack of words). There are so many directions you could go with the decor of this room. I would more than likely stick with the stained beams unless you plan to paint the window trim and baseboard too. I would remove the wallpaper on the ceiling (eww, not fun but necessary) and I would keep the ceiling and wall color similar if not the same. Let us know what style and colors you like. You will get great advise here.

Removing that wall paper (or ceiling paper) will be a pain in many body parts! I would rent scaffolding so that I could lie down close to the ceiling and not have to strain my neck and arms. If you have the budget I would pay someone to do it. Good luck.

I agree that the wallpaper on the ceiling will be a nightmare to remove. It is may be a bad idea, but what do you think about papering white paper over it instead of removing it? Would you be able to tell the difference?

I think we agree on the carpet - we were grasping at straws a little because we need to aim a huge budget towards the kitchen.

The house has hardwood floors throughout - apart from a bedroom and this great room. I think it's possible that there may be wood underneath - we will take a look.... after we've dealt with the ceiling! ; )

We don't want to go with concrete as we want this room to be kid friendly. I was thinking leather sectional or something comfortable. I am a crazy neat freak and our current living room furniture is not really kid friendly (light Pottery Barn type furnishings) so now we're expecting I want a room that looks great but is also a bit more relaxed. We'll put our current stuff in the formal living room where I think it will work quite well.

I'm a bit flummoxed by the size of this house - we have lived in the city for the past 9 years in row homes, and this is a big house in the country. It's all a bit overwhelming!

The decor in the house is all pretty dark - the bones are amazing, but the previous owners really liked dark colors!

I do think that keeping the dark beams is probably a good idea if we're going with a white ceiling.

I am a fan of Wedgewood Grey and we will almost certainly paint a room in the house in that color - either the master bedroom (which is also red) or perhaps the great room? It's such a big room that it's tough to envision what it would look like.

Thanks so much for the feedback so far - the other rooms (apart from the kitchen) are easily fixed, but this room will be expensive to work with and we don't want to mess it up and have to redo - especially if we get carpet, we have never put carpet in a house before so have no experience with it.

Wallpaper over wallpaper is a bad idea. Since it's a short sale you probably have some time ... banks are so slow --- have a contractor look at it. We had grasscloth all over many ceilings and it was quite costly to have removed.

Carpet has to go. Are they selling it w the billiard table (often they do). Do you want it? Might seem cool but if this is your main great room, perhaps not??? . It matters in your decision making because of the light fixture and also its bulk. Not to mention the green felt makes the red worse, DYT?

Good luck!

The pool table is gone, but I heard the seller now has 2 and may ask us if we want it back.... we don't.
Or if we did it would be for the basement, not that room. I wasn't talking about that kind of green for the walls though, I would go with something WAY more subtle.... but I agree the carpet probaly can't be salvaged sadly.

Here are a couple of pics from our last 2 houses showing the colors we like. This is Cream Yellow and is our current living room color - love how warm it is, and wonder if this could work in such a big room. No idea on what carpet would go with it, but if we do go with carpet it would need to be relatively kid friendly.
I don't know if this room color would be too light and not enough impact for such a big room?

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Here is a bedroom from our house before last with the Wedgewood Gray - I don't think it reads cold, but DH thinks it may be too much/ cold for the great room - he leans towards the above Cream Yellow for the great room. Thoughts? I like both.... or something new!

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Here are pics of the formal living room when it was furnished and now it's empty.
If we don't do Cream Yellow in the great room, we will do it in here. The furniture will be the stuff from our exisiting living room in the pic above.

With the previous owner's furniture;

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and now it's empty:

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Lose the ceiling wallpaper and the red carpet/ What's under the carpet? A wood floor would be nice.

Another no no that we did was paint over the wall paper. Very quick and easy compared to removal. On a ceiling..where no one else will EVER want wall paper it may be a workable solution. I am wondering if you but hard surface flooring in that room what sort of echo you will end up with? Can you work with the red and find some area rugs for the top of it? Do the shutters on the windows fold open, they appear too small to cover? I live in the woods and have no need to cover my living room windows. I did add fabric panels just for the color/softness they brought to the room. And again they would help with sound. The fixture over the pool table is one of the nicer I have seen.

If you want this room to be "kid friendly", I would replace carpet with either tile or commercial carpet. There are many fun patterns in commercial carpet; it wears like iron, and is relatively inexpensive.

If the carpet is functional and practical at this point, I would remove the wallpaper, clean the carpet and see how it all looked without that bright green baize from the pool table, and orangey leather furniture affecting it. With the right wall color it might look okay for the time being.

This looks like a house that has some rather high quality stuff in it, so I would be inclined to live with a color I didn't love for a few years instead of having to buy 100 square yards of cheap carpeting because it wasn't in the budget right now. (I also would really Not paint those beams...they define the room)

I would never try to paint over wallpaper, especially on a ceiling. The weight and wetness of the paint might cause the paper to fall and then you will have a real mess. Removing the wallpaper would be the first thing I would do. Then paint and then flooring. It's a great house, have fun!

This particular room and this house is one of those things that can get me on my soapbox about scale and proportion and how much better big rooms in this house are than the big rooms in new construction. That living room looks almost as good empty as it does with furniture.

The pool room is a real greatroom with good proportions. It is just strangely decorated. I very inexpertly blurred out all the distractions: it has an Awful Lot going for it, even with that reddish carpet.
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Another vote to remove the wallpaper on the ceiling -- paint the ceiling in fresh clean white -- and step back and look again at the room.

Keep the walls white too -- for now -- until you remove the red carpeting. A simple background will allow you to live with the room -- and decide its future design direction.

Frankly -- I would remove the carpeting as soon as possible and replace it with basic industrial carpeting (which is used in offices)in gray.

Add lots of color with fabrics, artworks and accessories for now.

In the future -- I would add custom white-painted bookcases in the room, paint out the rest of the woodwork to white -- and add delicious wood flooring with area rugs.

Palimpsest - wow that is clever! And yes just taking out the wallpapered ceiling makes a huge difference.

I don't think we want to go with white walls - we want the room to feel inviting and cozy despite its size. I think the Cream yellow from our current living room might work well.

I will have to spend some time looking at flooring options (assuming there is no hardwood under the red carpet). I think by kid friendly carpet, I meant something not too light and with some sort of pattern as opposed to industrial, but perhaps they have nice looking industrial carpet? I think of that as being something I would use in a basement not a living room? But as I said I have little experience of carpeting (we always have wood floors), so I'm not sure what options there are.

I think we'll go with the majority vote and keep the beams dark - now I've seen them in the photo shopped pic, I think we would lose a lot of the impact of the room if we painted them white.

Thanks so much for the ideas guys - I feel like I'm starting to get a grip on this one room at least! : )

I am not a huge fan of plain red carpet and I don't know the condition or shade of the carpet in that room but I think over the short term it could work. I think there is an automatic response to take it out, but classically this room would have a tabriz or something like that over a hardwood floor, --and that would be red...so maybe keeping a "warm" rug in here for the short term would be okay.
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This may sound crazy but, have you thought of painting the ceiling a deep olive gray or something like that? It might give the cozy feel and add interest with the wood beams. I do not mean to paint the wood beams:-)

If you need to keep the carpeting in the short term (for a couple of years), the cream yellow would work well. Or a pale khaki color, or a sand sort of color. Or grey--one of the nicest rooms I know of is grey, with accents of red, black and creamy off-white.

I think dealing with the ceiling wallpaper will make a huge difference and the red carpet won't seem quite so red, once the ceiling is neutral.

Agree with Pal on the beams and the carpet. You may be able to tell if there is a hardwood floor under the carpet by pulling up a floor vent and looking under the padding.

If wallpaper was put on correctly (walls sized) it will make removal much easier. That said, working overhead is never easy and certainly not a job for one who is expecting! That would be one thing I would hire out (even if I had to wait) and get someone highly recommended so they clean the ceiling well in preparation for paint.

Lovely home!

I second pal's suggestions, and agree that the look in the living room suggests that the red carpet is likely high quality. I'd certainly try working with it after you have it cleaned to ease your budget and allow you more for the kitchen. Having done a major remodel, we got our estimates, then mentally added a cushion for cost overruns, and still the remodel was way above that due to unforeseen things that developed. Removing the wallpaper will do wonders, and I'd keep the walls and ceilings the same color when you paint. Plus if you're expecting a little one, it's nice to have a big expanse of carpet for a crawling baby.

I was assuming from your name you lived in North Jersey, but you live a few blocks from the house on Delancey Place?

Where is this house? Suburbs?

Palimpsest when I redid my first kitchen with the help of the GW kitchen forum we lived on Bloomfield St in Hoboken.

Now we're in Center City Philadelphia very close to the Delancey St house (although sadly ours is not as large or as valuable!).

This house is in Bucks county close to New Hope, PA. We love that area and it's closer to DH's work - but I must admit after row homes in Hoboken and Philly, this house is a bit overwhelming. I hope we are not biting off more than we can chew!!

We're used to maintanence free backyards and roof decks. This place has a swimming pool and yard with grass that will need mowing and landscaping. Gulp.

I'll probably be posting more pics of the new house as we go. There's a lot that needs to be done, but I think a lot is cosmetic and removal of paper and some paint will do wonders. Of course just painting a house that size will cost a fortune and while we still own the Philly house cash will be tighter than it normally is when we buy a new house.

Good gosh!!! No advice from me that would be anything different than you've already heard, but I just had to chime in to say that the house is absolutely GORGEOUS!! Good luck, and I hope the deal goes through.