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

Drapes - Revisited, and Revisited, and Revisited Again

There are two large windows in the living area of our home. This picture shows what the front window looked like when we moved in - droopy old drapes and now cornice covering the traverse rod.

I made new drapes out of natural-colored muslin. This pic shows the second, dining area window, with the new muslin drapes.

This photo shows the front window with its new muslin drapes . . . . and a cornice. I got two cornices at a yard sale for FREE. The second cornice was too short for the top of the dining room window, so I lengthened it 68" with plywood. The tricky part was matching the birch stain: I ended up mixing all sorts of paint to get it right.

Then, one morning, I awoke with an idea buzzing around in my brain: Tea-dye the muslin drapes. This was some years after I made the original drapes. I was tired of the off-white, you see, by then. So I threw 400 tea bags in the washing machine, let them 'steep' in hot water, then pulled them out. Then I added the muslin drapes. As they were agitating in the tea, I thought to add some green Rit dye, so that's what I did. The resultant drapes turned out the EXACT color of the newly-painted wall. I'm not kidding; it was a perfect match. This photo also shows the copper-clad blind I got at a second-hand store for @ $4.00; I brought it home to find that it just fit our dining room window. Whoo Hoo!

Then, some time later - after yet another wall-color change - I dyed the drapes brown. Then I dyed them with black dye. Then I added a black striped to each set of drapes. Then I lined them, using old white sheets for the liner. This photo shows the front window, with a black stripe on the drapes, and the new brown color. 

This pic shows the back window when the drapes were still green/tea-dyed. This window was replaced with a sliding glass door just recently - Fall of 2011.....

In this photo, you can see the new door that replaced the back window. You can also see, in this picture, that the drapes have been lengthened to accommodate the new, bigger opening. 

[Note: you can also see the new wood floor in this photo - another story for another time...]

It took me @ 8 hours to lengthen those drapes. I added 7 new stripes to make them long enough. Hm. I wonder if those drapes will go through any more changes in the future! 

Thanks for reading this, thanks for letting me ramble on about our chameleon-like drapes!!!!