So I pinned and pinned and pinned away for a couple weeks and then I looked at the budget and decided what I could spend and then I began pricing out the things I wanted. Sadly, like many of you I had to prioritize my wants. While I wanted to 86 everything in the room and start fresh with a vision of mirrored elegant glass tables and deep upholstered dining chairs I needed to keep the expenses to a minimum and all new furniture was not in that plan. So I decided paint and a new light fixture were top of the list. I knew exactly the curtains I wanted, I had been eyeing them for a year or more. Yeah, yeah, I could have just gotten new curtains and left it at that but how is that any fun?
I picked my paint color....speaking of which have you seen the new stick on 8x10 color swatches? They are freakin brilliant! Why no one thought of this eons ago I have no idea. Then came the hard part....I wanted to do trim work, have always wanted to do trim work in that room. I priced out crown, chair and the supplies to add those really cool picture frame style boxes below the chair rail. To much, totally blew my budget. Since I have promised to redo a specific teen boy's room this spring I needed to split my budget between the two spaces. Decisions, decisions, decsions! So I chose to do chair rail and hold off on crown till later. I used the polysterene foam product from Lowe's because it is what our house has for baseboards so I figured since I was painting it anyway it would be a reasonable cost savings plan.
then............
came the hard part. Removing the grass cloth wall paper. It took forever to get it off, to wash the walls of glue and repair the damage where I tore the wall board paper. I sanded, filled, sanded filled, cleaned and sanded and filled and cleaned for two days. Finally they were at least an improvement if not perfection. (gonna be honest perfection is not really in my vocab. Done always seems like a good option to work towards.) Then I primed and painted and painted and painted and taped and painted! Why people say this stuff is fun is so beyond me. I do not enjoy the process all that much but I do like the results. Oh and I managed to get hives from either the wallpaper glue or the drywall dust, no clue which but it just added to the fun.
Once the paint was done, my darling husband arrived to help with the chair rail. We got it up in one afternoon, which considering our skill level and the miter cuts and lack of tools...calling it a miracle!
Then came more apinting. And touch ups, and painting.
The fun part of course is the shopping. Please stop for a moment to appreciate the irony of the fact that all that my darling one requested was new curtains and I had stripped, repaired, sanded, wiped and trimmed the walls and had not yet stopped to simply ORDER THE CURTAINS!!! Thinking about it now it is a little funny but at thae moment it seemed perfectly logical in my mind for the way I envisioned the room it started with the walls. So I went to the Ikea website to order the curtains I had picked so long ago as the perfect next accessory for my formal (in relative terms) dining space....only to find they had been.............gasp... DISCONTINUED!! eeek!!! I needed those curtains! nothing else would do........dada da daaaaaaaahhhhhhhh Amazon to the rescue!
And they were even prime! So my heart attack was short lived and I managed to score the curtains I had my heart set on!
Then while scrolling facebook one morning I stumbled across a post in a decorating group I am in of a new rug Target had, I NEEDED that rug so I hopped over to Target.com and discovered there was only 1 left in my area so I ordered it super quick! When I went to pick it up it had a big black oil stain on the outside edge and I was so sad, but luckily they did have more then one! So I still managed to snag me one!
Really there was not much more shopping I needed to do since the furniture was staying the same. I picked up a new cream colored loveseat cover, hated it, took it back and got a grey one. I decided my shelving was not all going back on the wall but I needed some for basic storage so popped up to Ikea and found the color birch evidently has changed since my first one was sold so I had to buy two more to get them to match. Husband Darling made the husband face over that one but if the color had been off it would have bugged me endlessly. Sacrifices! ;) Then I stumbled across a couple chair covers for my parsons chairs in their as-is section. Then need some alterations to fit in the tailored snug fashion I want but I think that will be easy enough. I haven't done it yet so we will see but in theory...easy enough.
Then the piece de resistance! A new light fixture! It is such a big impact piece that changing it made it like a whole new room! This was my first experience installing a chandelier though and it took me a few tries to get the whole thing assembled correctly and at the correct height over the table. But I did it! yay me!
Sometimes you realize when you are almost done that something is just a bit off.....that is what happened here. I started putting it all together and it felt just a little plain. My old trestle table that I pulled off the curb and has been so many different thngs for us over the years felt a liitle blah. So I picked up some dark stain and gave it about a million coats of it and it started to feel a little more sophisticated.
I had one more wall to decorate and I wanted something special. A Facebook friend was kind enough to help me with an idea I had and couldn't make materialize on my own. She did an amazing job!
For Easter we had our first family dinner in the new space and it felt so calm, peaceful and pretty. I haven't even finished getting everything just right but we already are enjoying the change!
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