Dining room progress and concept photos

This weekend, I slaved away at the dining and living room walls. I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with drywall mud, lol, because I love how the walls turn out when I'm finished but I *hate* the process of getting there! Putting on the mud, rolling it with a texture roller, smoothing them out a bit, waiting for them to dry, adding a smooth coat, sanding them, wiping them down...and then cleaning up all the sanding dust! So went my weekend. It was a dirty, dirty job, to say the least, but we now have nice dining and living room walls - a clean slate that only needs primer and paint:) I have photos of the mess but I'm going to wait and share those later because I don't even want to think about, lol. I'd rather think about what all this work is for- the end result that we'll someday enjoy.

So I've posted a few before, during and (future) after photos of our dining room. It's starting to take shape, though I must admit that it seems really bare now with those stark white walls. I *finally* settled on a paint color. I thought that I had chosen a shade of green called "Paris Green" but then I found a similar shade that I liked even better. It's called "Whispering Pine". It's a lighter, foggy green, if that makes any sense. The last photo below shows what we're going for in our dining room. I'll explain more down below. (click photos to enlarge)





On Saturday, I worked for about 9 hours straight on these dining room walls. I was so glad to be finished mudding! The table won't stay turned this way. The room is longer than it is wide and I think the table looks better turned longways. I'm just storing the white piece of furniture (in front of the window) in there for now. It's a future project, lol.



When we're all finished, this is what I want the dining room to look like (except for the ceilings - just pretend the photo shows white plank ceilings, lol!). The actual paint color I mentioned earlier is actually a smidgeon lighter than what is shown. I really like it! It's a nice soft peaceful green that looks great against the digitally added white window and door trim. The door you see there, that leads into the pantry/laundry area. We'll be replacing the bifold with a solid pine door painted "Russet" red, which is also going to be our kitchen cabinet color. Our dining/kitchen is just one big room, so I wanted to tie some of the colors together. I'm ashamed to say how long we've had this light fixture (still in the box!), lol, but it's just a very simple piece with linen shades. The dimensions in the photo below are askew - it's not *that* big, but about 25 inches across. The floors will be heart pine finished with tinted tung oil. My curtain fabric (that I've had forever) is a silk plaid taffeta- a sharp contrast to all the rustic, simple elements in the room. Though I'm not a taffeta kind of girl, I really fell in love with this fabric at first sight because the plaid element adds a colorful country touch that will tie all the colors in the house together. The curtain design will be simple - just long, straight drapes hung on an oil rubbed bronze rod. I'm still not sure if I want to go with a rod pocket design or just hang them with rings. I bought some white linen sheers that I may also use in here and they have a rod pocket, so if I use them, I guess the plaid curtains need to be the same.


So...I'm going for a really cozy and warm kitchen and dining room. Hopefully we'll be able to pull this off:)

Some before and after photos

Folks, what can I say? It's cold. I'm trying my hardest to thaw out so that I can get some work done around here, but I guess the best way to do that is to just start moving...

Before I do, I want to share with you some photos of some of the projects we've been working on. I finally found my photo editing software and can now upload new pictures. Remember to click on the photos to enlarge.

I posted a before and after video clip of our deck a few weeks back, but for those of you who didn't see it (and because we're so darn proud of it) here is a before and after photo.

Before (poor, poor, deck):


After (va-va-boom!):


On to the inside of the place...

Our living room fireplace wall before: (notice the dark heavy tile for the fireplace surround - it's ok but we wanted to lighten it up)


The fireplace after: (We went with small tiles that resembled limestone. The real limestone tiles were too thick and wouldn't slide right under sides of the mantle. To avoid "dismantling the mantle, we opted for a thinner tile that gives us somewhat of the same look for more than half the money and effort. It really lightens the feel of the fireplace, I think)



The walls in the above photo are now drywall mud white. You can't tell it in the photo, but I applied a certain texture to the wall. In a couple of weeks, we'll be priming them and then painting. Here is a photo that poorly shows an approximate shade I'm shooting for. It's warm yellow. We will eventually be putting pine planks on the ceiling, painted out white, but until then, we'll just give the ceiling a fresh coat of white paint.



It's been fun trying to figure out ways to turn a contemporary home built in the 70's into an "old" house. There is no trim around the entryways into the living room, kitchen, or hallway. Adding trim would be somewhat tricky because of how the corners meet. You may have read here before about the decorative relief that I'm doing around these entry ways. I now have photos to share:) The reliefs were done using a large stencil and drywall mud instead of paint. I still need to sand the reliefs to smooth out a bit, but they've turned out great! I have a couple other entries to do and it is rather time consuming, but it will give some character to otherwise boring entries. The stencils will be rather subtle - painted out the same color as the walls and maybe antiqued a bit.

These are a little hard to see...

The first one shows the pitted effect I've added to the walls.







I have other photos, but I need to get to work. Right now, Jeff is moving our electrical junction box from the hallway to the laundry room. This will get it out of view but will also allow us to raise the ceiling in our hallway from 7 feet to 8 feet. All the wiring was in the way above the 7 ft ceiling which made raising the ceiling impossible (unless we wanted to just box it all in with drywall, but I didn't want to have to look at that every time I walked down the hall).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Kim

She lives!!! (And has photos to prove it.)

Over a month has gone by without an update but that's not because we haven't been working on the house. In the last entry, you saw our "beautifully gutted bathroom" as it was just a month ago. So I thought you might be interested to know that it's still beautifully gutted, lol. Yes, as the last warm days of the season quickly disappear, we decided that we need to finish our deck project. This has pretty much been our weekend project since the middle of September. It was in pretty rough shape and we even tore part of it down, which meant rebuilding more railing. I'm pleased to say that it is now repaired and stained and it turned out great! If the weather is nice this weekend, we'll apply one more coat for good measure. It's nice to be able to look out our dining room window and see fresh color instead of old ugly wood planks. I can't wait to put planter boxes along the railing!

Anyway, if you would like to see some of the before/during/after photos, click this link. http://www.onewomanslife.com/deck.wmv Needless to say, we are very pleased with the result! Oh, the lattice you see propped up against the lower half of the deck, that's to keep the dogs off until we do the second coat. I just sprayed the dust off the deck right before shooting those photos, so it's wet.