Before and After: Dining Room

The dining room has always been the place we put stuff.  Cheese's crate is in there, a random bookshelf from my college days, Gui's cat scratch post, and other odd and ends.  Not surprisingly, we very rarely ate/eat dinner in there (we are "dinner-in-front-of-the-tv" folks).  And it happened to be the only remaining room downstairs that hadn't been painted since we moved, and that means it was still that horrible beige-yellow color that the whole house was when we moved in.  I hate that color.  It freaks me out more than all white walls.  So, about four weeks ago Antoine and I finally decided to tackle the dining room.  For some time I had an idea in mind for it, so it was just a matter of buying supplies and getting our butts in gear.

Here's the before (please excuse the mess):

Our first idea when it came to the dining room was to paint one wall with chalkboard paint.  We thought it would not only be fun for us, but fun for any guests who came over to visit.

 Here is is in it's curing state.  Once you paint the wall, which takes several coats, you wait like 3 days and then cover the entire wall with chalk.  Then you wipe it off and your wall is ready to go!

 Woot!

 We've already had some fun with it.  Although, note to animal owners; if you draw something on the wall at their level they will lick it off!  Hopefully chalk isn't very harmful to pets?!  They seem fine...

Next up, we knew we wanted to do something with the light fixture.  It came with the house and while I don't dislike it, it was a bit sad looking. After searching at antique malls for a new fixture we realized that we didn't like many of them and the ones we did like we're out of our price range (aka more than $30 or $40).  So, we decided to spray paint the existing one, to liven it up a bit.  To be extra crazy, we went with a color shifting spray paint.

Before.  We decided to paint it without taking it down, so Antoine would not have to risk electrocution.

Unfortunately the color shifting paint is a little hard to photograph, so this is the best I got.  Sometimes it's purplish and other times it looks bluish-green, and I love it!

The painting of the walls and the light fixture took one weekend.  Then we spent another weekend working on refinishing a new cabinet we purchased for the room (more on that tomorrow).  And then we spent another attempting to hang pictures/art and shelves.  It wasn't until the fourth weekend (this past weekend) that we got everything in place.

Behold, the finished product:

 To go along with the one chalkboard wall we went ahead and painted the rest of the walls a bright, light blueish color called Polar Drift.  Let me just say, those paint and primer in one are awesome!  They are totally worth the extra $$.  Seriously, one coat of paint, that's all it took!

 It feels way bigger and brighter than before.  

 I love the curtains, they let in so much light and were a steal at Ikea.

 This little art project only cost like $10.  And it was so much fun to melt the crayons, I felt like a 6 year old.

 This was also inexpensive to create (read: free).  I took four old picture frames I had from college, spray painted them black (with some existing spray paint I had) and then put some small pieces of my marbled paper in them (and cut a couple mats at work using our handy dandy mat-cutter).

 I love, love, love our bright green rug we got from Ikea!  Since it was so cheap I was expecting it to pill badly, but so far...nothing!

I think one of the best ideas we had regarding the dining room were the wall shelves.  They are a huge improvement over that cheap old book shelf and they freed up so much floorspace for things like Cheese's food/water and crate.

I've got a couple more dining room related posts coming up in the future...including a basset hound's curious reaction to a new bright green rug.  Stay tuned.