Evolution of Our Home: Dining Room Edition

Here's our dining room as it stands now.  Like all rooms in our house, it is a work in progress, but so far I'm loving it!

But, before we pay any further attention to the present, let's take a look at where this room has been...

The year: 2009. The room: dining. The color: golden brown.  Something needed to be done.

 Look, I found a shot of that accordion door I told you about in my post about how our living room has changed!  Its the far left side of the picture above.

 Sorry for the blurry pictures.  I'm just glad I have ANY pictures, as I took these before House in the Heights was even an idea in my mind.

The first thing we did was peel off the wallpaper patterned with golden strands of wheat.  Here's a shot of the room with the wallpaper partially removed.

While the dining room was not the first room in the house to undergo wallpaper removal (nearly the entire house was wallpapered), it was the first room in which we endured difficult wallpaper removal.  My usual technique of spraying a fabric softener and water mixture onto portions of the wall and then using my hands and a scraper to pull the paper from the wall worked....a little too well.  On large sections of the wall the drywall came off along with the paper, leaving large rough patches.  My husband had to undertake a major re-spackling project in order to repair the surface of the walls to a smooth and blemish-free state.  I'm not sure why this happened, but I think it must have had something to do with either the wallpaper or the glue used in this room.  We did not have this problem in any of the many other rooms in which we used this wallpaper removal technique (although we did have some OTHER wallpaper removal problems that I will get to once I show you those rooms!). 

Once the wall paper was off, we patched any holes we found, sanded the walls to perfection, used tack cloth to remove the sand paper dust and got to work with paint. We painted the bookcases white and the walls gray (True Value paint in Wizardry).  If I'm being honest, the gray color takes on more of a blue undertone than I had envisioned. It seems to depend on how the lights hits it.  Maybe someday I will repaint it another shade of gray with less of a blue in it.



We also replaced this beauty with a chandelier.

But once again, the real changes happened once we ripped out the old carpet and replaced it with Pergo.

Which pretty much brings us up to where we are now. 

 That's an area rug that we are no longer using rolled up in the  bottom right corner. Its not usually there.  Please try to ignore it, I really didn't want to get my camera back out for more pictures!

Some of the decorative accents in this room, like the wall of plates and the magazine racks, are deserving of more detail.  So I'll cover them in a separate post.  Stay tuned for that!

I'll leave you with the dirty little secret of our dining room, as well as a wish list of what else I'd like to do in here:

Secret: We use the cubby space underneath the buffet in the dining room to corral our cat toys.  Bron (left) and Guma (right) LOVE their toys, so once a day we walk around the house picking up everything they've gotten out and put them back in the baskets.  Not the most traditional use of space in a dining room, but at least they are out of the way!

Dining Room Wish List

-Have fireplace converted to gas burning

-Replace fireplace surround with something silver and more modern

-Update the buffet area (new countertop, some sort of shiny backsplash, paint cabinets?)

-Find a mantle for the fireplace (for some reason, I think a rustic, unfinished beam of wood would be a cool juxtaposition with some of the more modern, sparkly, shiny elements in here ) 

-Find an 8x8 area rug for under the table (area rugs in that size, that are the right style/color, and are the right price have been IMPOSSIBLE to find!)

What are some 'wish list items' that you have for YOUR house?