The Dining Room

So I took a few weeks break after the playroom to go over ideas of what I wanted to do for the dining room. Let's face it, its HORRIBLE in there. From what I hear, back in the day, people really liked this flooring....I can't believe it. I am sure its true since my mom said it was true, but I can't believe it.

There is so much I want to change in there. First and foremost I want to change the floor. The old lanolium looks like this.....

I HATE this. I have issues with patterns. Most patterns will make me dizzy. I wear solid colored clothes and can't even look at my daughter much on days her daddy dresses her in a striped shirt. I look because she is awesome and my daughter, but I can't relax and feel normal until she is in more solid clothes though. This floor pattern makes me dizzy.

But I get ahead of myself. I should start with a picture of the room. Or a few pictures since its a larger room and I have to get all the angles. And YES, once again I start with a messy room. My kids had the games out, and we had shoved the table aside with stuff on it to tackle some errant ants that thought we wanted to share dinner. So, brass light fixture (Ug!), mismatch hodgepodge of types of decor collected over the years, a horrible patterned floor.....I have a LOT of work to do in here.

So why do we have 2 dining room tables you ask....well, we have the room for them. We had this extra corner and I wanted to build something. I hadn't built anything for awhile and just really wanted to build a bench seat and table. So I did. It is great for having the adults at one table and the kids at another, and great when my brother in law and his wife and 4 kids come over. The kids like to use it for games, arts and craft and later it could be used for homework etc.

Sometimes I just have to build something. That time it was the bench and table. Who knows what whim will take me next!

Back to the room. Here is another angle with the kitchen. Really the kitchen and dining room are all one room. I plan on incorporating the colors etc into both and bring it together that way.

So as you can see, there is lots to do still. So far I have gotten the walls painted, the trim painted, some curtains possibly picked out. And now the room is a bigger mess with paint cans and packaging everywhere. Its a wonder we can find the table to even sit down and eat. Thank goodness my daughter has her high chair still so I know she has a safe clean place to eat. My son has his spot too. My poor husband I have been standing to eat.

Here is a few pictures of the progress I have made. Our biggest grief has been the color. We wanted a shade of green, but green is SOOO hard to get the right shade. I am not sure if we got it quite right, but I am holding my opinion until the new floor is installed, because that made change things. Sigh. Life would be so much easier if I could just empty a room before working on it. Too bad that just isn't possible. So I guess if you bother to follow me as I redo all the rooms in the house, you are going to see a lot of mess. LOL.

Turns out the bench seat is handy for using as a table to paint the trim white!

I think the color for the most part looks blue in pictures and in some differnent lighting schemes. I think it just had a touch too much blue in it. I would have liked a touch closer to sage green, but again, I am going to hold out an opinion for a bit. It took a month to pick out that color, I don't want to have to do it again!

From this next angle with the playroom in eyesight, it finally looks green!

I think the white trim really made the room look better. I think I might replace the trim once I redo the floor. That way I can install matching trim to the playroom trim I put in before.

Curtain choice attempt #1....SOOO SOOO Bad. I hated it and returned it the next day.

Curtain Attempt #2. The hubby loves these. I LOVE the curtains...just not 100% convinced they are right for the room. I may end up just doing roman shades or something that sits inside the window frame instead of covering the top part. And while my camera could not capture the color of the curtain no matter what I tried. You will have to believe me that they are a beautiful shade of green. They don't clash against the wall as much as they appear to in the pictures.

Well folks, that is as far as I have gotten. Stay tuned for more work and re-setting up the room!

The New Coat Rack

Before the redo, we would come through the playroom and up the stairs to the shoe rack at the front door. This naturally means that we track all the pine needles across the playroom, where the kids play on the floor, and up the stairs. Yeah, not the smartest set up. The kids get poked by the pine needles and its nearly impossible to vacuum them off the stairs. So I came up with a plan. Why not clear out one corner of the room and build a shoe rack. This way we only track in the pine needles about a foot in the door.

I wanted to use the bead board and build a nice frame around it and add the hooks, but in the end Robert wanted something super simple. I had to agree it wasn't working really well to use the bead board. So that part got nixed. What we came up with is very simple, but quite nice for the kids to be able to hang their own coats up.

I also built a shoe rack to match in the corner. Again, just a simple frame up with simple trim work. My son helped me paint it white to match. The one thing I did like was NOT using coat hooks. I was at Lowe's like always and I realized that cabinet handles would work for the jackets just as well and would look nicer. I bought one of those cheap packs of cabinets pulls. I think it was.....a pack of 10 for 15 bucks or something like that. I bought 2, attached them to the wood and then attached the wood to the wall (through the stud for stability).

The kids like that they can reach their level of hooks easily and I like that they look schnazzy even when there is no coats hanging up. Here is the before, during and final design I built. I promise I have since painted the shoe rack white to match. For some reason I didn't take a picture of it. We have also moved around the desks since the "before" picture below. The larger desk is on the opposite wall, the bookshelves are now on this wall on either side of the white desk. The brown desk on the left is sold and gone. It really balanced it out and made the blue, white and brown scheme really work here.

Here is the before.....

Yup, my daughter loves to climb on the shoe rack. LOL.

Amd the nearly finished corner.

And a close-up of the cabinet handles I used. It still makes me smile to hang up a jacket when I get home.

Stay Tuned for The NEXT project room...The Dining Room!

Scrape Scrape and More Scraping

Once I decided to embark on this, I thought "Sure, let's just see some paint color first" and threw this bright and cheery color on the wall. I had no idea how much work was ahead of me. I started out with just with a touch of color.

I loved the color! So then I took a huge breath and took my trusty old crowbar and took off the first section. What I discovered was 30 year old glue that will often come off and stick to the wainscotting taking most of the wall down to the paper off with it. Sometimes it sticks to the wall though and that was a real ugly mess to get off.

Since I am no stranger to a bit of spackle, I patched what needed to be patched after hours of scraping the old dried glue off with a chisel and my hammer....yes, that SMALL wall took a few hours of scraping. That glue has been stuck there for 32 years (give or take) and it wasn't letting up the fight for anything. The one thing I knew I wasn't going to be able to hide was the chair rail line. Behind the panels was straight drywall with texture on it. No paint. The above had the original paint, the red paint with the sand stuff in it from the previous owners, the layers of primer and the pony tail color paint on the top. I could try sanding down and spackling the edge down a bit, but it was impossible to hide such a difference in layers.

What can you do right? We don't mind how it turned out anyway. Its the playroom and we love it. A little extra line isn't going to change that. Here was that first wall and corner after spackling and the first wall of color up there.

As you can see, I also decided I wanted white trim. My hobby is woodworking so while I love wood in its natural state, I just LOVE the way white trim looks and makes a room feel. So for the first time ever I painted the wood trim. We left the door as it was. It looks a bit odd we know, but we kind of like it and I didn't have the energy to pull the door off the hinges just yet. Perhaps at some point. For now, it works since we have a lot of wood furniture in there.

I loved this picture because it really showed what a difference it made removing the wood panels and changing the paint color. Its like a before and after picture all in one picture.

So I moved on to each of the walls and it took hours to scrape all that glue from all the walls. All in all it took probably a month of weekends. Mostly because with a 1.5 year old and a 4 year old I could really only work on it while they napped on the weekends and for only 2 hours each night once they were in bed. At the time I was working 6 days a week and during the week I was working 9-10 hour days. I would hurry home and get here just in time to put the kids to bed and grab a bite to eat and then get back to scraping and spackling. I don't think I slept much during January and into February. :-)

The other walls took a lot longer to do, but they gone done. I wasn't going to leave it half done. I even bought new trim (cheated and bought the already white trim) and that really made the room look amazing. Here is the rest of the transformation.

Pretty schnazzy! Stay tuned for the new coatrack and shoe rack for the corner of the playroom.

Our Playroom BEFORE

Since the day I moved in I have thought about that wainscotting...Do I like it?...Do I hate it?...Yup, I pretty much hate it. The room has irked me from day one because when we moved in it had red above the wood. Red is not bad (Hard to paint over) but not overall bad. The bad part was that they had done some kind of faux treatment that made the walls untouchable. They felt like SANDPAPER. It really hurt as we moved stuff in and you fell against it.

It took 2 layers of primer (thick thick primer) to make it soft enough to the touch to, well, touch. Then I painted it a nice ponytail color. Its a soft neutral that I thought would warm the place up. The result was this. And YES, I realize it looks like a pigsty. Let's be real here. I have 2 kids who use this playroom a LOT. I have a husband and 2 kids who all think my desk is the dumping zone for the stuff they don't want to put away. AND, I had already moved all the toys from around the room to this side of the room so I could start on the other wall. So yeah, its a mess. Most of the rooms I will do will start out looking like this because I can't just empty a room to work on it. I have to shift stuff around so we can still USE our house while I work on it. So ignore the stacks of papers and toys and just look at the walls and pretend the rest isn't there okay?

So that side is a mess because I started with this wall behind my son in this picture.

While it was warm, I still had a nagging hatred of that wainscotting. It just felt very old and very dark. We went back and forth on that for nearly 2 years. I wanted it gone, but wasn't sure how to go about it. Robert liked it and was fine with painting it white or keeping it. In the end he gives me the freedom to choose if it goes or stays so I finally decided it should GO!

Stay Tuned for the pictures and steps of the overhaul!

Hello and Welcome

2 Years ago my husband and I bought this house together. Its a big beautiful house, BUT its very outdated. Not so much structurally (unless we count the poor old pipes that we neeed to replace), but the interior selections of color and woodwork. We love the house and we want this to be our "forever" house. Or at least a "super long time house" anyway.

So begins this journey. After 2 years and the birth our little girl, I have decided to update our home one room at a time. I do have a standing hobby of woodworking that will help me if I need to build something for any of the rooms. Its hard work, but I do enjoy the work. I have already completed the first room and am about to begin the second room.

Hopefully I will get a few followers on here that can help me pick colors and finishes along the way. For now, I must sleep, but perhaps tomorrow I can find the time to give a little review of our new playroom and our thoughts about project 2 which is the dining room and kitchen.