More of our Dining Room

I really wanted to take some pictures of our laundry room to show you all but the weather has been absolutely miserable here (and everywhere else, I think) so it's been too cloudy to get any decent photos. That'll have to wait, I guess!

So, which room still gets enough natural light in the dreary misery that is winter to photograph? The answer: Our Dining Room. I'm still not completely done in here (will I ever be??), but it has come a few more steps forward in the last few months, which is worth a post in my opinion. 

I talked a bit about how the dining table makeover and how I spray painted the brass light in this post, but I also knew that it would be replaced as soon as possible. I have been eyeing this Pottery Barn knock-off chandelier on Overstock for months now. Like, to the point where I would get online just to look at it and then I would walk in our dining room and imagine it in there, and then I wouldn't do anything about it, and then Bryan would call me a crazy lady like he always does, and then I would repeat that process every night of the week. (Please tell me I'm not the only one?) 

Anyways, I finally bit the bullet and ordered it. I was really only worried about purchasing it in the first place for two reasons, the first being that it's black and although I am incorporating a few black accents around the house, I still get nervous since I love my lights and neutrals. The second reason is that it's three feet wide, and I wondered if it would look silly over our pedestal table that is just over four feet wide. It doesn't though, thank goodness!

It just looks awesome, to me at least.

Here is what the dining room looked like when we closed on the house.

Since then we have...

-Taken down wallpaper and border, textured the walls

-Painted walls and ceiling

-Ripped out linoleum, added new wood floors

-Taken down blinds, hung new curtains 

-Replaced the chandelier

-Refinished our dining table and have begun decorating/accessorizing

Here is where we are right now:

It's like a breath of fresh air to me! The curtains probably make the biggest statement. They are from Ikea.

 Have I mentioned how hard it is to photograph this room? No? Okay...it's hard. The windows are always blown out in photos, which makes everything else super dark.

You can see a little bit of the craftsman style doorways my handy husband just finished last weekend. I LOVE them. They were just plain drywall before. 

And notice the barstools I told you all about that are a score from Craigslist. I don't know what color they will end up being (?) but we love eating our meals at the counter. They are currently black with natural seats but the finish is super worn. 

You can also see that I moved the birch painting that used to hang over our mantel. ( I get emailed about that thing more than anything else--except maybe Parker's room.) I sometimes think about moving it back, but am obsessed with how much it adds to this room. And a peek of our cabinets!! I will photograph our kitchen at some point. 

I wish I could convey through these photos how big these windows are....but my lens only shows so much. :)

We still need to bulk up the baseboards and paint them to match the cabinets, add blinds (probably bamboo...), and a rug. I am so torn on the rug because it really needs to be round to fit the room, but I'm also considering making the table bigger with the extra leaves we have for it. There is a good 7-8 feet between the table and the barstools (hard to see, I know), so I'm kind of wanting to fill up that space with more table and more seating. Would a round rug look weird with that? Thoughts?

So there's my before and after for the day. Have a great rest of your week!

New Curtains and Shower Decorations

Hello! We've had a crazy couple of weeks, but I wanted to pop in and share a little peek of our new dining room curtains and some of the decor my friend and I made for a lingerie shower this past weekend. I LOVED it. 

My friend Alli pinned a triangle garland that we both fell in love with, so we decided to make our own version. I ran these through my sewing machine and was amazed at how much I loved the look! 

We went with the super popular gold and pastel color scheme. I found some beautiful lace fabric on super sale (very similar to this inspiration image) and we used that as our table cloth. The shower was at night so I took all of these before the food was out...all of the platters have sticky note labels on them if you were to zoom out :). 

We also did a monogram theme and had several B's around the house (for the bride-to-be's future last name) as well as some delicious custom monogram cookies that I forgot to take a picture of! (Similar to this but in our colors....if you live in Lubbock I will hook you up with the best cookie lady ever!) I got that frame at Goodwill and painted the frame gold, the matte board white, and the original print with chalkboard paint. Alli drew the B and the laurel....she is great with chalk!

I also sewed a few ruffle garlands and basically want to keep them up forever. I LOVE them. They don't look as substantial in the pictures as they do in real life, but they added a lot to the table backdrop! Easy to make, too.

Our new curtains are from Ikea and so is the curtain rod. The curtains are pretty popular in blog world and I think they look a lot more expensive than they actually are. They are thick with a linen look and have the hidden pinch pleats which is a plus! Also, finding reasonably priced curtain rods for bay windows was a pain in the hiney and I was so relieved to see them at Ikea! 

In the living room I hung more paper and ruffle garlands. And added a B. I never know how to decorate living rooms for showers but I like how this turned out. When I took these, we were in the middle of a nasty dust storm so all of the colors look weird since it was brown and dark outside...sorry. ;)

We also finished our KITCHEN. Yay!!! Well, it's not completely finished--I ordered a new faucet and am still waiting to get it in the mail... and I also need to paint the pantry door and the trim, but other than that we are done for now! Y'all...it makes me so happy when I walk in there. I absolutely, positively, LOVE it. Cannot wait to share! Oh, the power of paint and a handy husband :). 

Have a great day!

Dining Room Updates

When we first looked at our house, I fell in love with the huge bay windows in the dining room, but that was pretty much the ONLY thing I liked about this room. The blinds, wallpaper, light fixture, and icky linoleum had to go -- and fast.

You agree? Good. :)

When we moved in, my mother-in-law and I immediately began tearing down the wallpaper and chair rail. I've always heard terrible things about taking down wallpaper, but I thought it was kind of fun. (I'm weird.) The texture underneath the wallpaper didn't match the existing walls, so we had someone come out a add the texture--which was a lot more pricey than I thought it would be, but I was happy to have it done. Bryan laid the new floors, and my family (mostly my dad) painted the dining room in the same color we had in our old house -- Benjamin Moore Camouflage, and the ceiling in Valspar Antique White. I also took down those old blinds as soon as I could, as well. Let there be light, right?  

After ALL of that, we were out of money but still wanted to update a few things to get us through 'Phase One' of the dining room makeover.

First, I needed to do something (free) to this brass light.

In the future, hopefully by the time we renovate the kitchen, I want to completely replace this light with a big dramatic chandelier of some sort. But to get us through for now, I decided to remove the light covers and spray paint the metal part with a basic white that I already had. 

Here is what I ended up with...

I have to say, I really love how it turned out...kind of industrial in  a cheap way, haha. I used some of those round bulbs we already had and (you know, the ones that are used in those dated strip vanity lights--yeah, we have those too), but I like the overall look of them on this light.

For the next project, I really, really, wanted my husband to sand down and re-stain our table. Bryan was nice enough to re-finish the table top about a year and a half ago, but it wasn't sealed properly (sorry B), so it had gradually lost a lot of the color from cleanings. 

I was also really tired of the cherry color (which didn't entirely match the pedestal base) and thought that since our new floors were darker, it would be best to lighten the table up completely.

After a lot of bribing with golf and more golf, Bryan sanded down the entire table (in the garage, in the middle of August in Texas for that matter). I got like 15 small projects done while he did this, so I still owe him pretty big. I helped a teensy bit by sanding the table top finely and staining it, but my wonderful husband did pretty much all of the dirty work. :) We used Danish Oil to give it just a bit of natural color, and sealed it with  a poly-acrylic sealer in satin. (We researched sealers a lot and this one seemed the best for the matte look we wanted and has held up perfectly with a toddler and constant cleanings.)

SO. 

Here, again, is what we originally started out with...

And here is our 'For Now' After...

We still have A LOT we want to do in here. Among these are: getting new blinds that are raised to the ceiling (I'm thinking bamboo, of course), new curtains that also go to the ceiling (some sort of subtle pattern), a new chandelier, possibly a new rug (I can't decided what is easier to clean with a kiddo), and I also want to decorate the walls, maybe move our Craigslist buffet in here...etc. 

Bryan did a beautiful job with the table and I am SO obsessed with the look of  it now. He left the existing stain in the crevices of the pedestal, partly because it was too hard to sand, but partly because I really loved the distressed look it gives off. Winner!

So, there is a little before and after for you. Hope you enjoyed it!

Have a wonderful Wednesday.

Dining Room Updates

Hi! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend.

As I mentioned in this post and this post, we have been hard at work in our dining room lately. It was the first space that we wanted to update in 2012 and I'm happy to say that we've already made a few major changes!

I last left you with this....

Ugh. I know. It was horrible. That was LAST January, right after we put in the wood floors.


In 2011, I purchased a pedastel table off of Craigslist (one of my all time FAVORITE pieces of furniture), and a few new bamboo dining chairs from Pier One. But then they just sat there....so lonely and sad. To make matters worse, the dining table was really scratched up after years of wear and tear during its stint with the original owners. Ten months later (truth), Christmas break rolled around and my wonderful, amazing, super talented husband finally sanded and refinished the table top....

A warm cherry....no scratches....be still my heart. :)

We also hung a few prints that I cut out of a Monet painting book (courtesy of Amazon) in some $10 frames from Ross. We even made custom mattes using the method I showed you all here.

AND THEN. And then, I came across a very cute rug. And bought it. I was actually about to walk away from it (to weigh my options) until I saw another lady seriously eyeing it. My competitive side got the best of me, and I snatched that rug up as fast as possible and bounced my little pregnant self right to cash register. I tell you...it was quite a sight. :)

Soooooo....here is not an "After" picture but definitely a "Much Improved" picture:

SO much better, right?

I know I originally talked about buying a dining room rug from Overstock in this post, but I decided to go in a different direction (suprise, suprise) after thinking a lot about the fact that the dining table sits right next to our back door which is a huge source of dirt and dust and dirty dog coming in and out of the house. Although I was in looooove with the light colored rugs I found on Overstock, I knew that it would be much more practical (for the sake of my OCD) to get something dark and durable.

Ahhhhhh, it's like a breath of fresh air to me. Still far from being done, but much more "grown up" than it was just a year ago :).

Before:

In Progress:

Now we just need to get to work on changing or updating that dang light fixture. I'm just not a fan. And I would love to paint the back door at some point. Any thoughts on colors? Any ideas for how to update the light fixture?? I am BEGGING you, please help!

Have a very happy MLK day! If you are enjoying the day off, I am SUPER jealous. :) But have fun for me!