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!'

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!!!!