I thought I’d share a little progress report about our dining room aka library. We selected this room to paint first cause we thought it was gonna be easy. WERE WE EVER WRONG. Face palms forehead. Were we ever stinkin’ wrong. Here’s how it went down: we thought, oh there’s no wall paper to peel, this will be easy. Just minor clean up on the walls, and patch and paint.

We lived in this fantasy land until we found two layers, that’s right, two layers of wall paper. One a construction paper texture in dark green, and the other heavy canvas that was cut out for each square in the wall. Let me tell you something, there was a moment of fear and crying and our hearts sinking because we knew how long this would take. All in, it took us mid July to September. Keep in mind there were some vacations in there, and other stuff, plus a friend staying with us helped for a few days. But wow, I don’t like having a room under construction for that long. All our furniture was out in the hall way, we’re bumping into stuff, etc. Renovating a major room, like living room, dining room, kitchen is the toughest. When we did our bedroom, it took us two weeks and that wasn’t so bad.

So, onto the renovation drama! Here’s the status.

Dining Room Pros: The ceiling was in great shape. We had to do very little work, just a few small patches. What killed us: because the humidity we had some bonding issues with the patches, and everything came loose and we had to do it again!

Dining Room Cons: All the boxes on the wall. Holy cow, we scraped, patched and sanded all those boxes. So. Much. Work. And dirty sanding work at that. Give me a plain wall to repair any day. I’m not a baby when it comes to doing stuff like this, but my hands had blisters, and then the sanding was horrible. Another con was the peeling paint that needs to be removed around the french doors. We are still not finished with those, any time you remove paint from a door with all those nooks and little places to work around, it’s gonna take forever.

Worth it? YES and I’ll tell you why. I hate the color yellow in my own home. I do like the color yellow in general, just not in my house. I see other people use it beautifully, it’s just not for me. Color is SO emotional, that having all this yellow actually affected my mood. It put me in a bad mood!! I know yellow should make you happy, but every time I looked at it I would get the creepy crawlies and cringe.

Lessons learned:

• – Use the right primer. Yupp, we had some nasty paint adhesion issues.
• – Wash the walls three times after sanding, I kept finding dust everywhere.
• – Take a break, but set a loose timeline. Taking a vacation helped with our sanity check.

What’s next?

This is an in-between update and next we’ll begin to design the room. Big items on the to-do list are drapery and a light fixture. We also need to take a hard look at the furniture in this room. I don’t like the table and chairs. The table I want to get rid of and the chairs I’ll repurpose. I like my butlers shelf in there for now, but I’d love to get a buffet that’s much lower. I like the lower furniture option for the buffet because it won’t clash with a lower light when looking in the room from the dining room. The large rug is new and staying. We need a lot of upholstered chairs and maybe even a high back love seat. One big design challenge I have is I kinda hate the book shelves. (I know, blah.) They look really cluttered and disorganized. I haven’t decided how to address that but putting some chairs in front of them would certainly lighten the visual clutter blow. This is why decorating is not a fast process! You really have to identify what your problem areas are and find a solution. I also have to add some height to the top of the book shelves. I have a bunch of collections up there now, but they need height and division.

Hope you enjoyed seeing where we stand now, and what’s happening at Stony Ford. This is a really long term project but it’s exciting to see it come together. Next up, I’ll share the progress on our bedroom in January. Thanks for following along!