The New House--Part 2-- Dining Room

Today I'll show you our progress in the dining room.


Dining Room (and pass-through to kitchen) Before: Above the kitchen entryway we found a huge, deep crack in the wall under the paint. We filled it with joint compound (thanks Dad F), sanded it down, and then painted it. It is obvious that the dining room had water damage at some point. Beneath the chair rail, the dining room was painted a high-gloss forest green with white half-heartedly painted over it. We tried to prime this as-is, but the primer just scratched right off. So, we had to sand it all first (thanks Katie, Christina, and Bart) and then prime.


Primed! In a few spots, mysterious pink and blue ink (?) would bleed through and no amount of primer/sealer would stop it. I finally decided to gougue out the spots with a chisel, fill them with spackle, sand, then prime. That did the trick!


After: Painted with color left over from the condo (thanks Suzi). The only drawback is that this is flat paint, which I don't think will hold up long with traffic in the room. We'll see what happens. Check out the professionally refinished floors! I'll talk more about the floors in later entries where the transformation is more visible. The baseboards still need to be painted.


Coming together


Furnished, but not finished. I bought the wool rug off of Craigslist for a mere $10 when I was in college and lived in an apartment with hardwood floors and an 80% rug rule. When I got married, I insisted that we keep my three wool rugs because cheap, attractive, wool rugs are hard to come by! We stored them in huge FedEx bags (the kind for skis or for shipping full-grown men according to a former coworker who got in one) for three years. I bought the curtains for $2 brand new at a yard sale, purchased in summer 08 and set aside. It was fun to finally be able to pull them out!


Still to do: replace the chandelier or spray paint and bedazzle the existing one (my hubby is so against that idea, but I have this vision...), put real paint over the primer above the chair rail, add tie backs for the curtains (though the knotted one kind of works) , finish putting stuff away, figure out what to do about the water stains now visible on the floor since we took them from a dark red to the natural wood color.

2-7-10 Update:
I finished painting Colonial White above the chair rail; re-caulked all of the trim (which took way longer than I thought); and I repainted below the chair rail with the exact same color, but in semi-gloss. The flat paint was already looking beaten up and since we had to take out all of the furniture to access the crown molding and chair rail, it seemed like the best time to do it.

A note on the semi-gloss—this is 3-year-old paint that we had left over from our old place. The lip of the paint and the lid had rusted, and it was nasty. To salvage the paint (because I am that cheap, and I do hate waste that much), I used a stir stick to lift out as many big rust chunks as I could. The paint was separated so it was easy to see the chunks suspended in the clear, oily-looking top layer.

Once big-chunk-free, I poured the remainder of the paint into an old, dried out, empty plastic paint can, being sure to pour the paint out against the least rusted part of the can lip. Luckily, I had one clear spot on the lip for this. If you don’t, you could try delicately covering that part with paint and letting it dry, then pouring over dry paint rather than rust.

Once in the new can, the paint still had some very small flecks of rust but there was no way to get them out. So, I just stirred them in. When painting, I never came across black chunks or anything.



And some gratuitous showing off of our beloved dining room furniture and glass collection…


Green glass, some new (wedding gifts), some vintage
Furniture is Broyhill's Continents collection. This is one of those things in our life that is in no way eco-friendly, but we looked at many possibilities over months and this was the best option (and after spending months picking it out, we had a 10-month wait when the furniture got stuck on a ship). We planned to keep it for a lifetime, so we are very happy it fits so well into the new dining room!


Pink glass glasses, cake dome, and 3-tiered server (wedding gifts) and the origami version of my bridal bouquet that my hubby made as a first anniversary gift (paper is the traditional gift).