The Dining Room Gets Smaller with Each New Coat of Paint!

I mentioned, in an earlier post, that our dining room has been through a lot of changes. So I decided to chronicle some of those changes this morning. 

We bought this house in late 2004.

The color of the wall . . . . changed and then changed again!

The table changed, too....

The art on the wall changed over the years....

And the curtains went through several changes.....

The fan light will be gone in subsequent shots; watch for it!

I eventually tacked one of my quilt creations onto a huge cork board, surrounded by striped wall paper and trimmed with cording we made with a drill.....

 Ah! The ceiling fan disappeared! This was a recent addition: track lighting with pendant lights.

And of course the most important part of any decorating scheme is the people who grace the rooms....

Why, there's Ed, my dear daddio. ,making our dining room especially good! Love you, Dad.

I quit! I have had a lot of fun this morning, reliving the passage of time through our dining room.

Susan

A New Door? No Problem!!!

Our dining room has gone through a lot of changes in the past seven years. 

After we built a deck just off the dining room, I started to look for a door to replace the dining room window. 

I published an ad for the door on a local radio program, Tradio - a format that allows folks in our area to buy and sell things. I got a call from a man who had a door for sale and we went to check it out. We brought the door home and put it in the garage.

We took a break from big projects and did a smaller one: We shortened the dining room table; we would need the extra room a shorter table would provide, to get to the anticipated new door. We found a pedestal-style base at a yard sale, brought it home and painted it black. Then we removed the center insert of the old table and covered the old table [top] with barn wood, center. Voila! We now had a nice table - shorter, yes, but wider. 

Shortly after we got the door home and the table shortened, someone loaned us a masonry saw. That thing was HUGE! We picked a day to cut the hole in the house, and we were ready to go. 

After the window was removed, it was time to enlarge the hole to accommodate the new door. 

It was a very scary thing, watching the beautiful sandstone of this house being assaulted by a saw. I would have taken pictures but I couldn't muster the courage to watch the actual cutting!

The actual installation of the door straddled two days. 

Bright and early the second day of the installation, we removed the tarp we'd put over the hole the night before and got busy building a frame for the new door. We rallied the troops: our sons came by to lend a hand off and on throughout the day. 

By the end of that second day, we were able to start enjoying the newly-expanded view. 

Thj

The finish work would take another week - dry-walling, painting, re-installing the cornice and curtains, etc. 

In retrospect, I think it's a good thing I didn't know all the ins and outs of what this sort of project entails. I was, like, 'Hey! Let's put a door there!' It wasn't until after the thing was installed that I thought, 'This could have been a disaster!'

Pallet Wood Redo In the Bathroom

When it came time to redo our bathroom floor and counter top, we turned to our tried-and-true material: wood. We chose pallet wood - hard wood from pallets. We covered the floor and counter top with beautiful, warm wood. We made our own wood putty by combining sawdust - from the same wood - and wood glue. For the finish, we used tung oil - another one of our favorites because it's a natural product and easy to use.

When it came time to sand the wood, we fired up two sanders and went at it in a marathon session! We were covered in sawdust!! 

These last two photos show Bill and I taking a breather - literally: we had to exit the bathroom to get our breath back! 

Daisy Border

My sewing room has been through m any changes in the past seven years. After we painted the walls two-toned green - with two colors of paint in the same roller pan - I wanted a trim  between the lateral green striped effect on the top part of the wall and the scumbled green on the bottom of the wall. I was not happy with my first attempt to create a border - see photo; that's orange paint applied with a sponge cut in a rough square. At least I had some sort of border, though, right? I eventually decided I wanted a more structured design for a border/trim. So I scanned a real flower from our garden, dropped the scan into a Word Doc, then added a black border around the flower. I printed up a batch of these so I could glue them on the wall....

Trouble was, I had to cover up those ugly orange squares first. For this, I turned to my trusty old friend, brown wrapping paper. I cut the brown paper into strips, then glued it on the wall where I wanted the border to be. Then I glued the flowery squares over the brown paper.

PS: I love working with wallpaper paste; it's fun and easy to use.