A house starts to feel like a home when the dining room comes together. We don't always eat in the dining room but once it's finished it makes us feel like people can come in and eat and we can spend time together!
We changed our vision about this room when we moved into this house (see our former dining room here for a comparison). Almost everything is new (to us) and our only overlap is a rug from our old living room. We decided to host Mother's Day this year which was a great motivation to get everything finished! Other parts of the house are still in disarray or aren't in their final stage, but it feels great to have made this progress.
Painting a house is way different when you have a 1.5 year old running around. We used to be able to spend a whole day working on a project; now, we can't do that and we don't really want to. Things are taking a lot longer this time around but it's also giving us a ton of time to enjoy the new house with our family and make thoughtful decisions about what we are going to do with our new spaces.
We chose a color scheme for this house before we even moved in and for the most part it has stuck. When we chose the dining room color we knew we were heading in a whole new direction from last time. Darker walls with our lighter original wood floors seemed more modern to us and anything was going to be better than the raspberry walls we walked into. We wanted the dining room to be a bit more industrial farmhouse than its previous traditional feel.
One day on Facebook, I came across a table that Rob and I loved on a resale group. $100 for a farmhouse table and three metal bistro chairs? Yes please! It was such a great deal. I got the other four chairs from a resale group online as well, I am telling you it's so fun to hunt and it's awesome when a good deal comes around!
We made the decision to take the knick knack size shelves out of the cubby and use it for a larger statement piece and we are super glad we did. We didn't have anything for this new space so we had to shop (bummer, right?!) but I was pleasantly surprised that upon my first visit to TJMaxx I found this perfect mirror for under $30! The two trays in this area were also a purchase from the same trip and were 25% the cost they usually are at non-discount stores. TJMaxx (and resale groups) for the win!
We are super happy with the way this room has turned out. It is the front of the house so you can see it from outside and it makes the whole house look more updated in and out!
If you are reading this thinking "all they had to do was paint" let me get into the real "fun." This house is 100 years old and the "fixes" people decided to do in the past were really half-hearted and annoying. There were 12 sinkers in the walls of this one room ranging from normal to what-needed-that-much-support and more nail holes than we bothered counting. In the cubby there were another seven sinkers/shelf!! What were they putting on these shelves? They also (under an unknown number of paint layers) caulked the cubby shelves which made it super fun to repair. I think we spent more time working on smoothing the walls than we did actually painting. We are happy we spent the time to do it right though, no old nail holes makes for a much cleaner look!
We will be back with more updates soon! We made a lot of progress this weekend while the kiddo spent some time with Grandma and we had a fabulous Mother's Day with our awesome family!
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| No joke, as I was adding this gif, Be Our Guest came on Pandora!! |
Happy Mother's Day to all the mom-hearted women out there. You are all amazing!
