Home Rennovations: The Dining Room

Bonus segment:  The very first room I started working on was the dining room.  I wish I had taken Before photos so you could see the difference, but sadly I did not.  You'll just have to take my word for it.  I began this project by repainting the wall.  When we moved in, I painted them what I thought would be a warm buttery yellow, the same as the kitchen, but it turned out to look like stomach bile as you can see from the kitchen pics.  So, I chose another color, and spent every afternoon for a week, dropping my bags at the door after work, tying on my apron and climbing up and down a ladder for 3 hours a day to repaint.  Next, I sanded and repainted my table.  I bought it at a Habitat Restore about ten years ago.  It was fully handmade and painted a beautiful robin's egg blue.  It was also sealed with polyurethane and so it heavily yellowed over time.  Now sanded and repainted, it is so bright a cheery.  I will likely repaint all the chairs white and they need to be reupholstered in a blue and ivory toille, but that will come with the warmer weather when I can work outside again.

The Chandelier was next to go in after the walls and table were done.  Once again, I did a lot of shopping around until I found this beauty on a resale site for about half the regular price.  Our shoes and coats were such a problem.  They were stored in Ikea lockers we bought in Japan that were intended to house children's coats and shoes.  Now that we have four adults, it just looked like those little lockers were throwing up coats and shoes and taking up all the walkway space in the meantime.  The first thing we had to do was downsize.  Everyone gets two coats and three pairs of shoes (my oldest daughter had approximately 30 pairs of shoes here that also took up all the walkway).  The rest goes in rooms, closets, or storage.  The coats fit neatly on these shelves which Mr. Bleu made from a tree he cut down last year and it has opened up so much light and space that I finally have room for plants!  

I used cube book cases so that they would fit under the window and let in lots of light, and purchased water hyacinth baskets to make the shoe storage much tidier looking.  Finally, Mr. Bleu tore apart and repurposed those old lockers to make this storage unit for our keys, telephone, and internet gadgets.  I also finally get to hang up my vintage puka shell plant hanger.  The flooring was the very last thing we did and I love it!  We had this horrible gray-blue carpet before that was really dirty and the color contributed to everything having that sickly green tone to it.  I am so glad that it's gone and I can't wait to get it out of the rest of the house!

Just a little decorating gem here.  Since this room has such high ceilings, I wanted to have something decorative up there and I remembered that both my grandmothers had plates decorating their coziest spaces.  One grandmother had a collection of Hummel plates that I loved looking at when we visited for the holidays.  So, I began researching vintage plates to see if I could find a set I liked and somehow instead found these Anthropologie mushroom plates that I liked much better than anything else.  I combined them with these vintage gold wheat Homer Laughlin plates that I also used over the kitchen sink.

The change in this room and the way it makes me feel to be in it is the difference between night and day.  I now love this space and love it when people come to my home so I can show them all the work we've done.  We still have two more rooms to go and it will likely take us a couple of months to get them done, but I am excited to finally have a home I love.