Dining room before & now

When we bought our new/old house the dining room came with busy red wallpaper and molding in desperate need of painting. The floors are original and were in really good shape, we just had them sanded and stained darker with a matte finish. I love how the floors turned out but talk about high maintenance! Every fuzz and piece of lint shows up.

We lived with it like this for about six months until it was next on the fixer upper to do list. I really couldn't handle being in this room for very long.

The before picture doesn't look too bad, ugly yes but the walls were in poor shape under the wallpaper and all the trim needed to be caulked and painted. It almost looked like someone primed the trim and lower walls but never finished with paint.
I was the painter on duty but we hired someone to refinish the floors and skim coat the plaster walls after we removed the wallpaper.

If you haven't stripped wallpaper in your life, consider yourself lucky. This was the remove all the glue with smoking hot water step. 

We moved the chandelier from our previous house to replace the seventies brass chandelier. I gave the old chandelier a little makeover and used it in our bedroom, I meant for it to be temporary until I found something else, but I like it. 

Our shabby chic buffet also got a little makeover with paint (Benjamin Moore Chelsea Gray) and new brass hardware.

I painted a big chunk of the wall with chalkboard paint because I knew I would miss writing and drawing on it like we did at our old house. And something about chalkboards just make me happy, weird I know;)

The giant mess in the background is the kitchen banquette in progress, more on that later.

At this point I'm starting to breathe easier because I was over the hump of hours of priming and painting and the room was looking fresher and happy.

Then it was time for the chair tryouts. I bought two wicker chairs last fall to kind of test them out, see how they fit and how functional they would be. They are comfortable but take up a lot more room then the smallish wood chairs, so once I realized we didn't need six chairs out at all times, I ordered the remaining two and love the way it pulled the dining room together.

Here is a look at the kitchen banquette from the dining room. We eat most of our meals there and use the dining room for games and crafts, lots of crafts:)

Our "nature boxes" were inspired by Lauren Liess. She is a genius to come up with the idea to use an old printers tray to hold collected nature. We fill ours with little rocks, shells and other things we find on hikes or at the beach. I love the subtle color and texture and being able to see our finds everyday. I recently picked up another tray for the other side of the window and spray painted it with black chalkboard paint to match the other one. I don't plan on writing on it, I just like the soft black color.

Next up is some type of shades for the windows here and in the living room, I'm thinking bamboo to match the family room and maybe trim for the drapes. I'll share the kitchen banquette process next time.