Evolution of our Dining Room

 

We have lived in our house for a little over a year and our dining room has gone thru many edits/changes.

Shortly after we moved into our house my aunt & uncle gave us their old trestle table. My uncle had added to the width of the table by add additional two by fours to the sides. However, with the size of my extended family we needed to add additional length to it also. So my guy purchased some two by six boards and attached them to the ends of the table. Once that was complete I sanded it down from the original reddish pine color and did a Restoration Hardware effect by using medium oak stain and light dry brushing on various colors of watered down gray paint. I love how it turned out.

 

 

 

This photo was taken shortly after we moved in. We actually had the Barrister bookcase in the butler's pantry holding all of our food staples. It was in the dining room at this time because we were working on the built-in for the butler's pantry. You can read more about it here: The Butler's Pantry

 

Notice the two tones of yellow. The one wall was all marked up and it drove me crazy so I grabbed the only can of yellow paint that was left by the past owners and started painting. Not sure why they left that color because it didn't match the other walls at all.

 

We found the buffet in the garage when we moved in. And, the sphere was from our last house. When we put the house back on the market last fall I had my guy remove it and put the old living room fan/light combo in the dining room.

 

The rug is an indoor/outdoor rug that I love because it is so easy to keep clean. It has spent more time than not in our dining room.

 

 

 

As you can see I painted the dining room blue and we added a trim molding around the room and painted the lower half bright white. Along with all of the trim.  Notice how I have the table at an angle? That drives my aunt nuts. She actually straightens it little by little when I leave the room.

 

This is a close up of the chair that the hubs spray painted a wonderful gray and I recovered with some outdoor fabric I found at Joanne Fabrics.

 

He also painted the hard rock maple spindle back chairs the same gray.

 

I brought the rug back in.

I have also attempted to use our old round oak table... But it never worked if we had more than four for dinner.

 

 

I tried to live with both types of chairs for a while but it just wasn't working, neither did the size or the round table.

 

I don't know why but at one point I also pull the old table from our old apartment out of the basement and attempted to use it. Yeah... It was even smaller than the oak table. What was I thinking??

 

 

Eventually I went back to the trestle table. It worked so much better for the larger dinners we have. I can seat eight people around the trestle table and in a pinch actually squeeze in ten people. LOL... yep we are a close family like that.

 

I love having a side board for storage. Living in an older house always calls for creative storage and I love changing out the display on top. Not just seasonally... sometimes as often as weekly.

But the biggest change in the dining room seems to be my love of chairs or should I say addiction??

We bought these from Habitat Restore for $3.00 each after I sold the above gray chairs... Don't ask. My uncle doesn't get it either. :-)

 

 

 

They were never comfortable and they lacked substance for the room. I tried various items in the room trying to get the balance right. Moved my grandmother's desk into the dining room to replace the side board that we sold... again, don't ask. That just didn't seem to work. 

 

 

Notice how I moved the Barrister bookcase to the wall that had the sideboard and desk? I just removed the one case and stored it in the basement. And, where the bookcase was, I brought in from the back porch, one of the metal stands we purchased from IKEA years ago. It gave the room a light airy effect on that wall, but it just didn't work for me.

 

When I finally decided that the faux bamboo chairs were not going to work I searched Craigslist for any and all chair deals. And, that is when I stumbled onto these...

 

 

A church in north Buffalo was selling their chairs for $5 per chair. We could only fit four of the chairs into our car. They are so big and bulky. But I was sure that these were what was needed for our family. We pulled the upholstery off the back support. There was no way I was going to be able to remove the fabric from the foam on the back of the chairs. The foam was so old that it just fell apart. So I decided to repair the wood. I filled the staple and screw holes, and repaired the damage caused by a protruding screw or two. Then I spray painted them a pretty French blue color and used a drop cloth from Lowe's to recover the seats. They were comfy, but just way to bulky for the table. I couldn't get the legs of the table and chairs to play nicely... they kept bumping into each other and fighting for space.

 

 

We lived with the chairs for a while... quite a while considering the life expectancy of all furniture in our dining room. But in the end I just wasn't loving them.

 

So the search was back on. Not only for new chairs, but I also wanted another sideboard. I just didn't realize when I sold the old sideboard how much I would miss the storage that it had offered.

 

We had started our search at Habitat Restore. We found the perfect piece however we didn't have the cash and their credit card machine was down do to the renovations they were doing. Oh well, it just wasn't meant to be. But the more I thought about it that evening the more I thought the piece would be perfect. So the next day we headed back with cash in hand. But this time I had to resign myself to the fact that it truly wasn't meant to be because there was a sold tag attached where there was once a price tag. I was disappointed but we both believe that if it isn't meant to be it isn't meant to be. 

 

A couple of weeks later we stopped in our local Salvation Army Store and found this piece...

 

Sorry for the poor photography... it was taken with my cell phone.

 It was even better than the one at Habitat. It was a little more than I was wanting to pay but we didn't want to chance loosing it while waiting for it to go on sale. I'm debating on how I want to restore it... strip and stain, paint, ???

 

The top looks as if a cat had used it as a scratching post.

A couple of places have chips missing.

 

As you can see it does have issues but for now I just scrubbed it down with soap and water and a little Murphy's Oil Soap.

 

 

I think it is perfect and looks great in our dining room. But I was still searching for the perfect chairs. I truly wanted some old wooden school house chairs like the ones Pottery Barn used to sell. But I could only find one or two at a time and they were way to expensive or in need of a lot of work. More than the price warrants.

 

So I continued my search on Craigslist and thrift shops. I even stopped at the occasional lawn sale but nothing. Then one day on a whim we stopped at Habitat Restore and there they were and at a perfect price.

 

 

Similar to the ones I loved at pottery barn but only at a very reasonable price. When we found them they only had the blue and red ones. The cashier said all 30 of the green chairs sold that morning. So we quickly snatched up four of the blue ones - it is all that could fit into our car. The whole way home I kept thinking we should really go back and get two more. The next day we headed back and as hard as it is for me to believe in that little bit of time (less than 24 hours) they only had two blue chairs left and half a dozen of the red ones. The cashier said that they had 30 of each color. Again, we believe if it is meant to be... it will be. Those last two blue chairs were meant to come home with us.

 

 

And, this is how our dining room looks today. 

 

 

 

I love the feel of it. There will be changes in the future... there always will be.  But for now it is perfect for us. It feels more like 'our' dining room than any of the prior setups that we had.

 

Thank you for stopping by.

Nan!

Design Boards

I have found a Swedish website called Neybers that allows me to play about with interior design. I have to say it is my newest addiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for stopping by.
Nan

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Floored!

This is out of sequent of actual events. However, I wanted to share our living room flooring obstacle and how I came up with an inexpensive temporary solution that we could live with.

When we first looked at our house we noted that the dining room had light wood flooring, the stairs and all of the upstairs had dark wood stain and the living room had carpet. We just aren't fans of carpet, so we both pulled back a corner of the carpet and were relieved to see the same light oak as the dining room.

One morning, shortly after we had moved in, about a year ago, I decided that I would pull up the carpet while the hubs slept. I was positive that I could do it before he even woke up and he wouldn't complain the I had started another project before finishing the other dozen or so.

I was doing just fine until I ran into a... Well it was a... "WhatTheHeck" type of moment.

I just couldn't believe someone would take the time to strip the floors but not continue with a section smack dab in the middle of the living room floor. It looked as if they had pulled the edges of a big rug up and stripped right to that point. Once finished they just plopped that big old rug back down and went about their business.

 

 

I mean, can you believe it? And, wouldn't you know that was precisely when the hubs woke up and came down the stairs. Now, normally he greets me in the morning with a, "Morning, beautiful!" but not that morning it was more like a, "Why? Why?"

He helped me finish removing the carpet and I tried for a couple of months to live with it by layering a couple of rugs over the dark spot. However, it did quite work....

 

As you can see the rugs were just a little shy of the LARGE dark patch. 

I did attempt to fix the problem and by fix I mean do the same thing as they had done... Pull the rug back and sand the floor up to a couple of inches under the rug. I figured that once it was stain the same color as the lighter oak I we could live with it until we could afford new flooring in a couple of years.

 

 

 

Excuse the poor photography I found these pictures on my facebook timeline.

 

In theory, this seemed like an excellent idea but in fact I could never get the stain to match the light colored oak. I must have tried three different stains.

 

So I gave up and just moved onto other project. And, we once again lived with mismatched flooring for a couple more months when an idea struck me.

 

Why not make the dark stain look intentional???



 

 

So with the help of our cat, Squeaker Man, I pulled up the rug.

 

As you can see the borders were haphazard and really needed to be squared up. First I attempted to do math and tried to figure out the size of the square but that just didn't work. Not for me at least.

 

So looked at it from another angle... so to speak. And, with a square and a level I marked out straight lines. I don't seem to have pictures of that step.

 

Hubs and I then went around the border with a sander and squared up where I had placed the pencil marks.

 

 

In the following pictures you can see my pencil marks

 

 

 

I decided that I would like some kind of border so I thought that the best bet would be to leave a section of the border the light color and stain the interior dark. Once I had the painters tape down and the stain completed, I realized that there wouldn't be enough contrast between the original light stain and my fresh sharp edge.

 

 

That is when I came up with the idea of adding a second strip of painters tape on the outside of the new edge and painting the new edge 'BLACK' for a pop.

 

 



 

I let it all dry prior to removing the painters tape. And, the results... I loved it!!! It isn't perfect but it is so much better.

 

 



 

If you look close there are sander marks, but still it looks so much more uniform and that is what I wanted.

 

 

 

And, this is what it looks like today.

 

Like I said, it isn't perfect but it looks so much better and I can live with it for a couple of years until we get the money saved up for new floors.

 

And, here is one more picture... a side-by-side before and after.

 

 



As you can see we have added wainscot and I have painted out all of the trim, including the stair rail. But all of that is for another post. But for now... I love what we have done to make this house our home.

Thank you for stopping by.

Nan



 

Love where we live!

We have lived in our house for a little over a year and have not embraced all that the area has to offer. To be honest we have attempted to sell our house and move back to Virginia. However, there are many factors that have made our house unsellable (repeated village floodings, high flood insurance rates, bad economy, high unemployment rate, etc...). We have decided, for the time being, to embrace our circumstance and "love where we live". There are many things to do here in western New York... Yet, we haven't done many. So this summer I have started a summer bucket list of things we would like to do... wine festivals, hiking, kayaking in Zoar Valley, Letchworth Park, local farmer markets, the Wednesday farmer auction, etc....

Here's to summer 2014 and loving where we live.

Thank you for stopping by!
Nan

The Butler's Pantry

We have a little transitional area between the kitchen and living room. The area I'm referring to is directly in front of that huge wooden cabinet. I'm not sure what this area is called or even if it really needs a name. But, I like to have a name for each room... thus a purpose. I have dubbed this area, "The Butler's Pantry". It's highly doubtful that this house has ever had a butler... but it seems a fitting name for the area.

Picture is from the MLS listing.

As I mentioned, it had a huge unusable cabinet. I could never find anything in it and I began to think of it as a black hole for our pantry/dry goods.

My mission was to find an inexpensive china cabinet that we could repurpose for the little recessed area in our little butler's pantry.

During a return visit to Virginia I made it a point to visit one of my favorite junk/thrift shops. If you are in the Virginia area I highly recommend Class and Trash,

We found a mid century china cabinet that I felt would fit perfectly in the recessed area.

Purchased from Class and Trash for $125.00

I knew we could make this work. It was the right dimension for the recessed area (17" x 41") and I was positive with a little paint and a little spackle editing it would look perfect!

Once back home I removed everything from the huge brown cabinets and we carried them out to the garage. Yep, added storage in the man-cave.

I scrubbed the china cabinet down with warm soapy water and then we removed the top hutch from the bottom cabinet and removed the doors. This project was done pre-blog and I don't have a lot of detailed step-by-step photos.




Primed and installed.

We mounted the upper part of the cabinet 14.5" above the base cabinet. We then added spacers (raw wood along the edge of upper cabinet) and hung beadboard in the newly created area between the bottom and upper cabinet.

 

Prime, spackled and roughed in.

Once we were sure everything shored up, we then made a baseboard for the front of the cabinet... to give it a built-in/always been there look.

 

 

Once the two pieces of the cabinets were secured to the wall and the trim was added it was time to  paint. I used ultra pure white paint in high gloss. I have painted all of the trim in our house with it.

 

This is the view from our stairway. Excuse the mess... just keeping it real. *grin*

As you can see we have plenty of room to store our pantry/dry goods.

Now for the big reveal...

Viewed from the kitchen... still need to paint the walls.

I decided that it worked best for me without the upper cabinet doors. Again... I like to have open shelving to display some pretty dishes.

 



 

Taken from the stairway. Excuse the trashcan and broom handle.

Now for a side by side before and after.... Don't you just love those?

The true before and after. It's a little blurry to see... we added new aged bronze knobs and handles.

 

We built/repurposed the hutch back in the beginning of summer and I still smile when I walk through the area. Best Investment Ever!


Thank you for stopping!

One Nine Inch Drawer... Really?

We purchased our 1940 Four Square house in April of 2013. It is located in a little village in Western New York. We truly love it, but it required some immediate changes.

When we looked at our house we were on a time crunch. We had three days to look and find a house. Which could be totally done... However, in Western New York the majority of houses don't have lockboxes and the realtor must hook up with the selling realtor in order to get a key. Not ideal when you have a time crunch and/or inpatient to look at a house.

We were all set to put a bid in on a house when our realtor told us about this house. She told us that she only had 10 minutes to show it to us because she had to be back in the city (1 hour away) for a meeting. And, we had to get back to Virginia.

It didn't even take us the full 10 minutes to fall for this house. It felt cozy, warm and well... like home!

However, it wasn't until we had our walk through that I realized the kitchen only had one drawer and it was only 9" wide.

Who has only one teeny tiny drawer in the kitchen? Well... us!

The before pictures are from the real estate listing.

We knew we would need additional counter space but with this realization we knew we would need to remodel sooner rather than later. The challenge was to add additional drawer/counter space without making our small kitchen feel even smaller. It was an "L" shape and we decided to make it into a "U" shape. This would only require a couple of edits. The first thing we did was remove the long vertical window and install a shorter one. One that would accommodate counter height cabinets under it.

 

  I don't know where the pictures of that project is. Once I locate them I will update this post.

 

They did leave us an inexpensive cart that they removed the wheels to accommodate the window.

 

 

Once that was done we removed the dishwasher and the minuscule little cabinet from the right side of the sink.

 

We then installed a corner cabinet with two built-in rotating kidney shelves. Adjacent to that cabinet we butted the much need drawer... three of them. *grin*. Mission accomplished! We now have a place to store our utensils and dish towels. Next to the drawers is a brand new stainless steel dishwasher and we reused the little minuscule cabinet on the end of the U-shape.

 

Sorry about the shadow... still learning how to take photos.

 

 

However, with a twist… we need all the space/storage we can squeeze out of our little kitchen so I asked my husband to cut-out the side of the cabinet and enclose the interior as a bookcase. The front is still functional… we use it to store our keys.

Note that we installed the tile to the door jam (back door) and down to the baseboard.

For the top cabinets, over the new counter area, we added a new corner cabinet and also reused the old upper cabinet that was above the old dishwasher. I love open shelving for glasses and cups. And, for that reason we didn’t replace the doors on the old cabinet after I finish painting it. More about that later.

 

 

The old and new cabinets have two different style fronts. To unify the look and make it less obvious I painted the lower cabinets a medium gray called Amazon Stone and the top cabinets and walls a creamy white called Eloquent White.

 

Having the walls and upper cabinets the same color opens up the area and makes it feel bigger.

Here are some before and after of our counters. It always amazes me how much a little tweaking and paint can change the whole look of a room.

Photos on the left are from the MLS listing.

Next on the agenda was the refrigerator area. When you walk into our house you look directly thru our little hallway/ butler’s pantry and into the kitchen. I found it jarring that you could see the side of the refrigerator. Not to mention... it was extremely unattractive.

Note that the trim & baseboards are stained in this room (all rooms actually) and white in the kitchen.

I asked the hubs to enclose both sides of the refrigerator to make it look more built-in. We also  install a cabinet above the refrigerator for additional storage. He built the cabinet box and repurposed the cabinet doors from the old cabinet. You know... the one that is now open shelving and holding our glasses and cups.

 

At this angle you can see a little peek into our butler's pantry.

Now the refrigerator has a more finished, built-in, look and it gives the butler’s panty (to the right) more of a defined space.

It is so much nicer walking in and looking into the kitchen area. For a comparison here is a before and after.

We are very pleased with how the kitchen turned out. It doesn't feel cramped at all. The hubs and I can work together in the kitchen without getting into each other way... well most of the time! *grin*

 
Whew! I hope this wasn’t information overload. Next time I will show how we updated our little butler's pantry.

 

Thank you for stopping!