I think I need a bit more info. I do not love knotty pine for me it is too busy and does not work with my style. For clients who have been in the same predicament I have covered it with thin gyproc or painted it . In my house we removed it all and then drywalled So maybe tell us what you are prepared to do, If to start you painted the waincoting and the louvered doors it would be a good first step maybe. The furniture being the same color is a lot of the same color. . Painting it is big job it needs to be cleaned really well the primed 2x with a really good primer so thta all the knots are sealed then once you have done that you choose a wall color. You need to decide how much work or $$$$$ you want to spend. Any info you share now is done in comments here in this post DO NOT start another post .

The pine room could work if you didn’t have the brown furniture. I absolutely loathe the pine wainscot- really I hate chair rails and wainscoting in halls with low ceilings, it just chops them up. I would rip that out completely and paint the louvered doors white.

This is called BUCKETS and buckets of primer and white paint on what can be really great walls!and I would include the fire brick!

.......and a rip out of the wall to wall carpeting for an engineered or hardwood floor. ONE leather sofa to a room, and smaller scale would be better, as those are taking over the space........made worse by additional leather chairs!

The chair rail should be kissed goodbye prior to paint. If at all possible ? Lose the louvered doors/dust catchers.

Depends your budget , right?

What does a dream room look like, post an inspo. I see you've already indulged in gray painted walls. Don't peck at things. .....: )

That is not truly paneling but 1x8 (or maybe 1x10) Butterfly Pine. That is a premium product and a big ticket item were you to buy it today. I may remove it in other rooms but I would leave it as is in the living room. It was never an intended product to be used as a wainscot.

I happen to like knotty pine, and think that the living room could look way better if you removed the old carpeting and replaced it with an area rug. Also paint the fireplace brick, get a more substantial mantel, and new window treatments (shades and curtains maybe). Replace the leather sofas with more clean-lined upholstered seating.

To me there is nothing more disgusting then painted over paneling and screams out cheap ghetto to me. carefully remove it to sell or give it to millworkman, then sheet rock and paint. Or you could throw up bead board pine on the ceiling with a stain and then hang moose and deer head mounts on the walls with plenty of outdoor pictures for a very rustic outdoorsy theme.

Here are some very nice living rooms with knotty pine paneling:

I might take out the waincoting and drywall that but I would leave the living room paneling and do something different with the floor, not in a wood look.

You have 2 choices..spend your money on having it all primed and painted including the brick fireplace..or spend your money on new furniture....get rid of the brown leather furniture..lighten it all up…remove the carpet…

No matter what, that is NOT a "cheap ghetto" in the making and your comment is an equally poor way to say you don't like wood paneling /painted. .......you could skip the deer mount comment as well.

It would be sad to eliminate all the paneling. Think of how many antique houses were “redone” and now we all regret it. Your house is classic. But yes, there is a lot of it.

I would strategically paint some of it. I agree with everyone who said to lighten up the furniture. Think this through and you will have a wonderful, unique home.

I love the wainscotting. I'm not as keen on all the knotty pine in the LR, however, I note you have brown furniture, yellow-green rug and dark pictures. With light furniture, pictures and rug, that room might look very different. The brown leather furniture looks very 60s, to me, too.

That is why I said only the wainscot to start you will see how much work and if you like the look of it painted . I agree new flooring could be the answer . I think the furniture is pretty classic you do need alot more lighting for sure maybe that will make the space feel different

" It would be sad to eliminate all the paneling "

And in my opinion sadder yet to paint it.

Someone wisely said....."It depends" if you want to lighten the furnishings considerably add a hardwood floor.....an area rug....

We can't define "modernize" FOR THE OP.

She has to post some inspiration of what ultimately feels welcoming if she had the "dream room" .

It isn't the sea of brown and bulky : ) she already has white window trim. ?

Thank you everyone for the comments! I would like to replace the carpet with a hardwood type flooring - I like the light wood colour flooring. However I'm concerned about a wood floor clashing with the wood walls, hence considering painting them. It's the orange-toned wood that bothers me, not the wood in itself. I am prepared to pay professionals for painting and flooring. The issue with new/light furniture is that we have young kids and a dog, so white would not stay white. When we bought the house we updated the trim and painted the walls, changed light fixtures, to see how much it could modernize it. But I think I'm ready to do more. I'll attach some pictures for the look I like.

Then you HAVE your answer! It comes in buckets of white paint,preceded by primer. Nobody lives there but you.

Ignore those who declare it a cardinal sin to paint wood - it is not, and it is just another surface no more deserving of reverence than any other.

If you wanted permission by way of "what would you do?" You got the responses and nothing matters but what YOU want!

No.....you won't get rid of "orange" in any other efficient way : )

Keep in mind how long you intend to live in this home. Whatever you spend on this home will be less you have to spend on the next home, but if it is a 20 year home you don't want to live with something you don't like for 20 years.

If this were a long term home (15-20 years) I would have the paneling removed or skimmed before painting. I would not want to live with the lines from the paneling all around the living room. I have also read about using a heavy liner paper over paneling to smooth the walls, but have never tried this technique.

A 5 year home, I might paint, I would probably just get new furnishings and live with the paneling (Next person will either love it or think "I can paint over that").

It will need a good sealing primer to keep the knots from bleeding through the paint. I like Zinsser BIN oil-based shellac primer.

What pics did the op post?

These..............along with. ...".I really hate the orange".

If someone hates something that is as simple as paint, and ridding a floor of a carpet NOBODY will want? I'd say have at it. It's a pretty good guess that few want the wood in its current color if you hang around here long enough! Five years of anything you loathe , that takes a week to be rid of? Go for it, and your own version of happy.

She posted these......

We had paneling painted in a room in a previous home, although it wasn’t knotty pine. Our painters explained it had to be pretreated first. As I recall, the painter said there could be something in the wood that can come through the paint. It made me a little nervous but the results were pretty amazing. Could not have been more pleased.

I feel like the LR would not have anything particularly unique about it if the paneling were completely removed. It would be a generic rectangle.

I would be on the side of removing a lot of the paneling wainscot and the chair rail and such but keeping the living room natural and seeing if the natural wood in a lesser amount was more palatable to you. But I would rather see the pickwick paneling painted than have the room turned into another drywall box.

Many natural woods turn redder or more orange as they age, I think that there are a lot of weird biases about color that are based on current prevailing tastes and I don't understand them. Now everyone hates "Orange oak or Pink maple or Pink oak and Orange pine, and really it's just the natural hues that come out in these woods. Do you hate your sofas? They are every bit as orange as the paneling...

Much of the character in relatively modest houses come from unusual details. I had a friend who grew up in a house that had a raised panel woodwork in the LR and knotty pine in the basement and pegged wood floors and the brick exterior was weeping mortar with appropriate sized real shutters and pink tile bathrooms and it was a kind of 1950s time capsule but very charming really (And lots of Persian rugs and nice furniture helped too). I was shocked one day to realize that the house across the street was the "identical" house tricked out in ordinary reddish orange brick everything generic, and it was so ...ugly in it's banality. Not unworkably ugly but it just had nothing going for it in particular.

The new owners said they were going to tear out all that ugly dated paneling first thing (it was all millwork not paneling like people thing of paneling, --and the family took it out and someone reused it. Now the house is just as generic as the one across the street.

We had an even darker wood family room. I purchased white/ivory carpet remnants cut to fit the room and had the edged bound. I also had white slipcovers on the furniture and all art work, lamp shades, etc. were white. The room became a sanctuary. In spite of having two young children, it was relatively easy to keep the room clean. (I should mention that when my older daughter came home from college she was amazed to find hubby and me EATING in the family room--bedtime and other snacks were relegated to the kitchen table until they got to college.)

Some option for décor

Doesn't it come down to what color and texture someone would like their " banal rectangle" to be? Why must it be banal at all?

Admittedly this is the internet, a place for all opinions, certainly!

That said, I think part of the problem with many threads is the device one is using. The app, or even when you could use a browser on the phone and not the app, it takes some scroll back and dig effort to read the prior comments. I like to read the replies from the op! In this case an op who ( my guess ) was fearful of simply asking a community "can I paint this orange paneling that I sort of really hate!?"

Is it possible that someone simply favors light vs. deeply colored walls, whether drywall or another material? Or for some, a little wood may go a very LOOOONG way?

It can take some real digging and poking at a client to get to their sweet spot - one they often can not really define. I may drop off a load of coffee table books, give the client a homework assignment and two colors/two packs of post it notes. "Take your time, slap a pink on any room you love, blue on any you loathe!" and return a week later.

I did just that with this gentleman....( below pics) and while what was revealed in his post it assignment was mostly bright white, mostly Victoria Hagan?! That was, over further time, not really his thing at all. It was his ART, his love of tradition, of fine things, aged things, and purely sentimental things. If you ask me how we arrived here? I can't get that far back down memory lane:) of the pick, poke, dig. The memory might even exhaust me.

He did use the word "modern!", so even that word may not be taken too literally.

I only know one thing. We began here........in "grannyville"?

and we arrived.......here. Leaving granny to wonder wth happened.

This year? His cherry kitchen will bite the dust to a PAINTED soft white. Nobody scream , please..........lol

After reading your explaination IMO either cover it with thin drywall and then paint or fiil the gaps and paint but beprepared that usually those telegrah through eventually . I think once you make up your mind to apint just do it and you love the look so no big deal and it opens the door to a completely differnt space and a change is as good as a reast often . Good luck and enjoy that new light and open feel BTW I have white leather with 3 huge dogs and amny parties still looks like new 18 yrs later So you can do white .

Doesn't it come down to what color and texture someone would like their " banal rectangle" to be? Why must it be banal at all?

This is a great question and I am not trying to be smart saying this. It doesn't need to be, it's just that in my opinion, there is something that is already there that could easily prevent this from being--and I agree that painting it (well) would be a more subtle but still a notch above drywall. It has a lot to do with what part of the country you live in, but I live in a city with plentiful 200-250 year old houses that have millwork that was never Not painted. It was virtually all painted from when the house was build and a lot of it was beautiful pieces of wood (Although the species didn't always match because it was meant to be painted)

On the other hand where I grew up most of the houses were turn of the 20th century with a second wave of houses built between about 1946 and 1980. The older ones had some nice woodwork, but just big, not necessarily fancy and the post wars mostly had really cheap millwork and the vast majority of it was varnished or shellacked. The house my parents rented had orange fir plywood cabinets and panel doors with the knots filled in with patches of wood. So did a number of our neighbors houses. And pine woodwork (orange) and oak floors (yellowish orange). All pretty ugly really, and a lot of it not painted still. In the late 60s and 70s the woodwork was all yellow. Again not nice wood.

I follow certain areas of real estate and I have been for years and I see some places come on the market a number of times over the years. And I've seen the houses I remember from growing up over the years come on the market.

And usually what I see happening is that if what was not essentially retained (sometimes preserved, sometimes refreshed)--if it was removed, particularly if the house is "updated" into whatever is current, regardless of how this sits in the house, the end result is banal, generic, looks like it could be in a new build finished last week. Because that seems to be what the majority of people want. It becomes banal because usually there is no real color or texture reintroduced, and it's no longer layers of it in the room.

And you can take a room with some character and furnish and decorate it relatively minimally and it will still be okay. But I room that is a rectangular white box is usually going to be a rectangular white box unless it is filled with nice things, and usually houses are not filled with nice things any more because they aren't within the finances of most people, or aren't within the current desires of most people, because furniture and decor have become disposable things.

You can look at an empty room in a house with some characterful details in real estate listings and "get" what that room looks like. On the other hand, if that room had the paneling completely removed, the brick painted (black is what most people would do this week) and the beams painted, and some kind of unreal "wood" floors that room would not look like anything in particular and would need to be staged either IRL or virtually for people to even notice anything about it.

A number of pictures have been posted of how relatively easy it would be to redecorate this room simply preserving the wood or painting it. But if you took it all out say like the before and after you posted of the dining area with the stairs in the back and that was now a drywall room, the furniture in the after, if they were in a drywalled generic space, could just as easily be an add for Rooms To Go and Lighting Universe. Completely fine and inoffensive but really generic and characterless. Not even Rooms to Go maybe, I assembled that dining room table and chairs for my sister to put in a second apartment and it's literally drop shipped from China and cost less than a decent warm everyday coat and they are making a profit. The little detail of the painted paneling in that room makes it look better than it is. In a drywall box it would look exactly what it is.

This is a long philosophical discussion not really directed at the OP specifically but I think it does deal with the overall question as to why some people do not want to touch it at all, or paint it, or especially remove it.

"But if you took it all out say like the before and after you posted of the dining area with the stairs in the back and that was now a drywall room, the furniture in the after, if they were in a drywalled generic space, could just as easily be an add for Rooms To Go and Lighting Universe. Com"

THIS is not drywall...........: ) behind the dining table.

The left wall may be.....as they changed the opening?

I know Jan they kept the paneling which helps. I said If but I meant if they had.

I'm not totally opposed to keeping some of the wood. The living room is just too much of it, and it looks too dated to me. I've seen the pictures with the nice living rooms with the paneling and white trim and accents, which is why we put in the modern white trim when we moved here. Part of the concern of painting it all is that it is my childhood home, and so there is a bit of sentimentality with the wood and changing things. But I would like to be able to decorate a bit more to my style. I also like natural elements like plants, wood, stone, earth tones. And I can add some more pictures with that. I wonder where I could keep some of the original wood, but paint a lot of it? Does anyone ever strip and lighten this king of paneling? There are a lot of grooves in it that might make that difficult.

Alternatively, you could go in another direction with darker gray-brown stain for an aged wood look - would help to mute all the crazy knots and completely change the vibe from Don Drapers house (been watching MadMen reruns LOL) to something new a more sophisticated version of rustic. Then do your fabrics and floors/horizontals in lighter natural tones and whites. You can get considerable brightness in a room by light reflecting up off the floor and the furnishings. I stayed in a vac rental recently that had the dark stained wood walls and it was stunningly beautiful, not at all the old pumpkin colored 50s look

Judging from the photos you posted of looks that you like, you're not going to get there keeping the wood walls, painted or otherwise. You want something more refined & won't get there with that rustic wood.

Here........

"It was my childhood home",,,,,,,,,,, So?

It still is your childhood home. But you are the young woman who wants her OWN home, but within the walls the parents provided?

You already have brick, white wash it!

Paint the walls, the paint police are not going to kick the door in

You already have leather furniture!

You do not have a hardwood floor

You can lessen the amount of leather and still have kid proof rooms

You can go online for a rug you love.

Also a nice wood coffee table.

But you need to be your own woman, it is your home and to keep asking a community for a permission slip to get a room you love, ......will probably get you the room you now have..or the room you don't really w.a.n.t.

One of these is You, the other is not

Pickwick paneling is relatively smooth and has a kind of traditional moulded profile on the tongue and groove portion so it's not like rough sawn barn wood, or thinline which was just a routed groove, so it should paint up pretty well, and even plank paneling can be formalized pretty well with paint:

This is lacquered, which is an expensive, time-consuming process, but a satin finish is relatively easy to apply well.

And unlike the thin veneer and masonite paneling of the 1960s and 1970s, many good millwork companies still make Pickwich paneling (the profile) so it can't exactly be dated in and of itself if they are still producing it.

Rustic in terms of wood grade because of the number & size of the knots. Painted pickwick paneling is going to look a lot more cottage/ casual than the more sophisticated looks of the posted 'I likes'.

Note how the joints and profile are accentuated when painted. Make sure you are OK with this.

I am prepared to pay professionals for painting...

Suggest that you make sure you know what you are getting...knots double/ triple coated with pigmented shellac primer, knots filled & sanded, pigmented shellac primer over all. To prevent tannin bleed. A LOT of prep work required. This is not a job for the low bidder.

Walls in a warm white keeping trim alone can make a nice look.

Lots of beautiful images

Just go for it : ) It's paint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFoRTqMSPI

The process is same, no matter the color.

The spaces and cracks are just part of the charm.

If I painted (and truthfullly I might, never was a fan of big ole knots everywhere) I would go dark or mid for a more sophisticated, moody kind of Euro look. Dark gray-green is my current fav - just google images for lots of ideas. As cilantro noted above, painted white planks are going to evoke rustic cottage mood. Wood expands and contracts depending on season and h umidity levels and the dark cracking between the planks will be plainly visible. But if you went dark, those lines would not be prominent. You could remove the carpet and refinish the floors which would provide some woody warmth to the room as well as reflect light - along with lighter fabrics and furnishings.