Dining Room Before and After

A few of you have e-mailed to ask how the new dining room wall color turned out - sorry to keep you wondering. I am very happy with the second color and the room is almost done so I thought I would go ahead and post some before and after pictures.

Here is the best before picture I could find - it is the weekend we moved in. Notice the brown walls tiny table and no chairs. What you can't see is the quarter size holes in the wall from where the movers of the previous owners ripped out their curtain rods. But, Adam patched those up before we painted and it looks good as new.

And here is my favorite after shot:

The second color is still bright and very cheery but we wanted something bold and fun which I think we achieved. The first color reminded me of a shade in between the neon yellow and neon green poster boards you can buy at the grocery store. Yikes. What we learned is that our chandelier casts a very yellow light on the walls which made the first color look much more yellow than we wanted. So we over compensated with green and now the room looks just about right with the lights on or when there is a bunch of daylight during the day.

Here is a break down of what we changed and what we still need to wrap up.

The table and sideboard are new. This was our five year anniversary gift to each other since the suggested gift was wood. Actually we bought the table before we knew what the suggested gift was - but it worked so we are claiming it is our gift after the fact. We want this table to last for many many years - we love it. It seats six comfortably right now (which was great this past weekend with our cousin company) but it also has two leafs which enable it to sit twelve. (maybe someday). We got both of these pieces on sale but they still took up a good bit of our furniture budget so we purchased unfinished wood chairs which are very affordable if you are willing to do the work. We decided to spray paint the chairs cream and upholster the seat.

The upholstering process is tedious but turned out pretty good. Because the leafs in our dining room table are built in, the table top is higher than normal. So I always felt like I was sitting too low. We decided to add 2" foam to the seat cushions to give some height to the seats and it worked great. This picture shows our layers. We started by cutting the fabric 5" wider than the wooden seat to give wrapping room. Next we added a layer of batting cut to the same size as the fabric. The next layer is the 2" foam cut just barely larger than the wooden seat. And finally the wooden seat itself. Adam watched a couple of videos on you tube on how to upholster the fabric smoothly - we started with those ideas and improvised as we went along. Here they are all lined up and ready to be attached to the chair frame. (well - almost all of them - we ran out of fabric and had to order an extra yard) The next fabric project in the room are the curtains. I looked and looked for the 'perfect' fabric but could never find it. Then one day I was browsing the aisles at Target and found a shower curtain I really liked. So, I bought six curtains with plans of turning them into my dining room curtains. We have two sets of windows so I figured I would put one full shower curtain on each side of each window and then I would cut the extra two curtains in half and attach to the bottom to make the curtains reach the floor. As of now I only have one curtain attached and floor length - hopefully I will wrap these up soon.

I also have something very special planned for the big open wall space to the right of this curtain. It is a gift from my dad on our one year anniversary and it has been waiting for the perfect home and I think this might be it. It is at the cleaners now and then needs to be framed but I promise to post some pictures when it is done because I know it will be fabulous.

We also changed out the chandelier - or I guess I should say Adam's dad changed out our chandelier. :) We found this on clearance and fell in love with it. The wood color is a lot lighter than our table and sideboard so I am wondering if I need to take it a shade darker with shoe polish or something like that. Any opinions or ideas?

And finally - the new picture art over the sideboard. I am very pleased with how this turned out - especially how inexpensive it turned out. I got the frames at Target ($15 each), took the photos myself at our botanical garden (free), and blew them up to 8x10 at Walgreens ($2.99 each). Not bad for a wall full of art. I plan to change out the pictures throughout the year - already excited about the Christmas collection I am going to put together. I am going to leave you with one final after shot looking into the living room...before and after shots of that room to come soon.