house tour, part 2

Next stop on the house tour: the dining room. This before picture doesn’t even show the previous horrendous light fixture and acoustic tile ceiling, which we tore down and replaced with drywall. And by we, I of course mean I didn’t do any of this. But I DID occasionally walk through and make encouraging remarks. And at one point, I walked through and cried because of how my living room looked (but I will save that for tomorrow’s room reveal).

And here it is now:

Here’s what we did:
–refinished floors
–replaced truly horrible crumbling tile ceiling with drywall; primed + painted
–patched all cracking plaster on the walls
–painted all trim and walls
–built a box around some plumbing that was going from the basement to upstairs, right through the corner of our dining room
–bought a cheap brass chandelier on Craigslist + spray painted it as a temporary lighting solution; replaced typical tapered bulbs with more modern-looking round ones
–painted a dining room chair white (ran out of motivation + spray paint at about the same time — hence the 5 still-brown ones)

Still to do:
–finish painting dining chairs
–find a piano bench (and possibly move piano back to living room. sorry husband.)
–recover all dining chairs
–buy curtains or roman shades for windows. the blinds just aren’t cutting it.
–eventually buy a real, grown-up chandelier (I love this one)

This was one of the first rooms in the house that we “finished” (painting + major-project-wise), and it was great to be able to sit down in a nice room and eat dinner together, even when much of the rest of the house still felt like a construction zone. Also, this room has my favorite paint color in the house. (For the curious + the copycats, it’s a Pottery Barn for Benjamin Moore color that I had color-matched at Lowe’s — it’s called Wedgewood Gray.)