Unearthing the Dining Room + More Cottage Kitchen & Dining Plans

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Well, our guests have come and gone. I have to say, the week before their arrival was a killer for me. I have never worked so hard in my life trying to get this house clean and presentable. You may have heard me refer to our home as a "construction site". It is like a construction site in the sense that I can never seem to get rid of the dust, nothing ever seems truly clean, everything (like furniture and other belongings) is always being shuffled around, supplies like paint and tools are (were) everywhere we turn ... ugh. So, for a solid week hubs and I worked on the house. We organized closets and rooms, painted the living room and hallway floor again (it's just subfloor - our hardwood will go down last), made our guest gutted bathroom a little less scary, scraped paint drops off our old ugly linoleum in the kitchen and put down several coats of floor shine, took ALL remodeling supplies that were piled up in our dining area back to the garage (we have a TABLE, folks!), put our cabinet doors back on, mowed the yard, weeded all the landscaping beds, mulched, pruned trees, added lattice to the bottom portion of the deck (I got to use the table saw and nailer to cut and put up all the trimwork myself - yay me!), painted part of the exterior, pressure washed the entire house and deck, and cleaned, cleaned, and cleaned! I couldn't believe how much work the house needed to get it back into decent shape. *sigh*

So like I mentioned, in this whole cleaning process, we managed to unearth our dining room. I wanted to share a few photos...I thought our next project was going to be adding beadboard around the dining room and kitchen and then adding the pine ceilings, but I think we've decided to first remove the door to the laundry room that is in our dining area. Hubs wanted to take this door out months ago when we were doing drywall work in the kitchen and dining area. However, I wanted to keep it because our pantry is also in the laundry room and I didn't want to walk through the living room to go through the other laundry access door that's in the hallway. My mother suggested, though, that we could buy a pantry cabinet to go in our kitchen and paint it up just like the cabinets (see the mock up photos below). I think it's a neat idea so that's what we're going to do. It may be a while before we can purchase a plain pantry to trim out, but we're going to go ahead and get that doorway walled up in order to add our beadboard.

(click to enlarge)

Just to show how far we've come with our dining area, this is what it looked like before our remodeling work began. You may be intersted in seeing some of the demolition photos.



Let there be light!


We'll soon be taking down that white door to the laundry/pantry room. There is another door to the laundry room in the hallway that we can use. I know the table is off center with the ceiling fan, but the fan/light will be replaced and moved to the center of the table after we put up our new plank ceiling.




I recently gave my farm table legs a little makeover. I painted them the same color that my walls are going to be, then aged and distressed them a bit more. Because we'll be adding white (or off-white) beadboard halfway up the walls in here, the legs won't blend in like they do now.







I bought this digital print on canvas last week. It has all the colors that I just adore...nice and cheerful, too! (And just $39!!!)



We have space in the kitchen to add pantry cabinets. See that wall space left of the black dishwasher?



A pantry cabinet would fit there perfectly, I think:) Thanks, mom, for the idea!

I think I'm going to go cozy up with a book now. It's called Once There Was a Farm: A Country Childhood Remembered and looks like a good one!