Dining Room Makeover

We’ve lived in our current home for close to nine years now.  Before we moved in our dining room was a pretty dark shade of purple.  The picture below was taken just after Ellee was born at a Baby Shower that our church family hosted.

It was an okay color, but it didn’t quite fit our personalities.

So just before we moved in, we painted it.  Weirdly, I remember that our goal was to paint it a neutral tan color, but somehow it ended up looking pretty peachy.  Which was fine and would be fine for the next eight years or so.    Which would bring us to a few months ago.  I was starting to get to the point where I wanted to change things up a bit.  Part was because of necessity.  We’ve always had a pretty open home and hosted various ministry groups throughout the years.  As a result, the carpet was starting to look a bit shabby.

Which inspired me to tackle the project of pulling up the carpeting.  This revealed beautiful, hard wood floors that had been just sitting there, waiting to be uncovered.  It was a pretty big project and it spanned a couple of days, but with hard  work and determination, I pulled up that worn carpeting and was delighted with the results.  The floors were surprisingly in pretty amazing condition and so we cleaned them up a bit and soon moved on to the next project.

It happened a few weekends ago, when Jeremy and Christian flew out to Seattle for a conference.  Ellee and I had a few open days and so we decided to take one and do a little painting.  Our walls were in rough shape and there were some holes that needed patching.  So we drove over to East Moriches Hardware (they are wonderful, by the way) and picked up some spackling and other painting supplies.

We taped off the moulding.  Which was a bit time consuming, since our house is really old and there was a lot of it.  This darling was amazing.  Our daughter is an incredibly hard working girl and I loved having her help and company.

She has a way of making work fun and we laughed and giggled our way throughout the afternoon.

We picked out a beautiful grey to paint the walls.  I knew if I could find the right shade, it would compliment the lighter color of the moulding and the darker color of the floor.

We worked carefully and diligently for about three or four hours.  We moved furniture, taped everything off and then gave the walls a solid two coats of Benjamin Moore’s Sweet Innocence.

It was a lot of work.  And strangely, the result came out a bit blue in tone.

But when everything was said and done, I was totally fine with the color.  It still looks a little more grey in certain areas, but overall is just fine.  I love the transformation and love the finished product.  It was a bit of an undertaking, from removing the carpet to painting the walls, but in the end was well worth the effort.  At some point, my next project will be to pull up carpet in half of the living room, but thankfully, that will be a project for another day.