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.

Weekend in Instagram

 Sporting my new nerderific glasses.

 Delicious pot roast leftovers (one guess what I'm having for dinner tonight).

 Spontaneous run to the liquor store for cake flavored vodka.

 Impromptu Commando drinking game.  Word of warning, when a drinking game suggests you play it with sips of beer, do not decide it would be fun to try it with shots of vodka!  You will have to switch to sips of cocktails after the first 25 minutes (aka 10 shots) and still you will have to adandon the game completely during the last 10 minutes of the movie!

 Darker hair, poofy style.

 Skips Deli: bad coffee, good bagels and cream cheese.

 Hiking in Yellow Springs.

Pumpkin-babies...oh how I love you!

Giving Good Face

Weekend in Instagram

 I take way too many pictures with Instagram.  Hell, with my iPhone in general!  It's a problem I have.  I'm getting help.  Anyway, here's the gist of my weekend...after a hellish week at work and at home (our cat Buddy passed away suddenly) it was nice to have a somewhat relaxing (although hurried) weekend with Antoine!  I worked at the tea house on Saturday for a bit, which is always good times.  We grilled out, A made blueberry crumb bars (which were AWESOME, and I'm looking forward to having one when I get home), I made blueberry pomegranate popsicles (using pomegranate Greek yogurt and making a small dent in the crazy amount of blueberries we have left from blueberry picking), and I started packing for our trip to DC next week.

 

A Big Tease

 I love Spring.  It's probably my second favorite season, after Fall of course.  Everything comes alive.  After months of dormancy and cold you get this taste of color and life.  The sun starts to shine, little green, leafy things start to pop up everywhere and all of a sudden you're whole mood changes.  I love this about Spring.  But the thing I don't love, the thing that drives me bananas about Spring in Ohio is that one minute it's beautiful, green and 70 degrees and then next it's gray, soggy and back down to 45 degrees.  Spring is a big fat tease and it's driving me nuts.  Last week was gorgeous (well, most of it at least).  After months of snow and freezing temperatures, it's like you become a Spring junkie.  It just takes one good taste of Spring and you're hooked; you're ready to steal $40 out of your mom's purse just to bribe the weather man to say it's going to be sunny and a high of 70.  Oh Ohio, why do you have to play with my mind?  I'm ready for bike rides with Antoine and gardening and grilling in the back yard.  Cheese is itching to go to the dog park, to run and play, but it's under water because it won't stop raining. 

Oh well, I guess I just need to be patient.  But the sad thing is, once it stops raining I know that it's only a matter of time until that evil Cincinnati summer is right around the corner.  If you live in Cincy, you know what I'm talking about.  Sticky 90 degree weather that feels like 150 degrees.  Sunburn.  Sweat.  More sunburn.  Bees.  Ugh, Summer.  Sometimes you're nice and fun, other times I think you're trying to kill me!  Please stay away as long as you possibly can.  And Spring, please stop raining...at least for a couple more days so we can do some fun stuff outside!  Thank you.

 From our garden.

 Tulips from our flower box.

 Also, in the flower box.

 Gui in the window.

 Spring Grove Cemetery.

 A walk around Xavier/Norwood.

 Cheese on our walk around XU.

Cheese trying to be a cat and look out the window.

Happy Friday all.  I hope you have a lovely weekend, despite all the rain we're supposed to get.  I'm bound to have a lovely weekend and week, considering I recently found out that Antoine won't be flying off to Chicago this coming week!  He gets to work from home all week and I can't wait! 

The Dancing Tongue

 and the portly fuzz-ball of a cat.  Or a portrait of Guillermo (alternate title).