Dining Room: Chairs

I meant to make this post forever ago, but had the pictures on my phone and kept forgetting to put them on my computer. Better late than never I guess.

I still don't have a full dining room update as I'm waiting until we hang our pictures up, but here's a taste of some of what we've done. To see the "before" and the "during" click here and here.

When we got married, Steve's grandfather refinished a dining room table that was his parents' and his grandparents' before them and gave it to us as a wedding gift. I LOVE it! It's a dark mahogany table with two leaves. The feet are metal, bronze I guess. Overall it's just gorgeous.

Unfortunately, we had no chairs to match it. When we first got married, my Oma bought me chairs at a yard sale. Actually, she bought bar stools, and my dad cut them down to chair size. There were three of them. So when we moved into the house, I was desperate for matching chairs. Steve and I combed yard sales and came up with nothing. Until my friend Karen told me that she had a set of six mahogany chairs that were her grandmothers sitting in her attack, unused. They just weren't her style. Being the amazing woman that she is, she gave them to us for free!

They needed a bit of work. Actually they still do as some of the veneer on the detailing is coming off, but we can easily fix that. The biggest thing that needed to be done was reupholster the seats.

You can't see very well in the picture--it's from my cell--but they were stained and faded. Karen said they were last upholstered in the 40s I think.


So I stripped it all off and saved as many of the upholstery tacks as possible. Steve and I picked out a fabric that is kind of the revers pattern as our dining room rug with the colors we have carried throughout out our kitchen and dining room; teal/turquoise, green, and brown. I upholstered all six chairs myself using a combination of the old upholstery tacks and a staple gun. I'm sure it's not done totally correctly, but it looks pretty good if you ask me.

Here's how it looks in the dining room, which again isn't done, and again this is a crappy cell phone picture.

I'm really happy with it. It's pretty much my favorite room in the house, especially because of the area around the corner to the left, which I'll show you in a another post sometime.

Dining Room Update

The house is even more a shambles now than ever. We cleared most things out for the yard sale, and my grandparents have packed up more, but we aren't all that much closer to the official move. Now that much of the furniture and rugs are gone though, it's easier to see how big the house is now.

Check out the view from the dining room! This picture was taken at 7:30 tonight on a yucky, rainy day, but look how bright it still is!

Bunny!

Steve started taking the yucky flower border down.

It looks so much better without it. And look how bright it is, despite the hour and the gloomy weather.

The walls will be this color green in the end! I'm so excited. I feel like I can picture exactly how it will look, but I still can't wait to see how it ends up.

Dining Room: Hutch Ideas

I am officially addicted to reading other people's blog. Just since last night, I think I have added maybe five new blogs to the list of blogs I follow. One of them, that I stumbled across last night, is Better After, a blog that highlights before and after shots from other people.While browsing this blog, I found some ideas for the hutch and buffet I talked about in this post.

 

This first one isn't my favorite, but the hutch is very similar to the one we have, so I'm filing it away in the "ideas" file. 

And this one I love, and think it's something that is totally doable for us, probably minus the lights and the paneled background. The color is much more like our table, and I think it would look great against the green walls that we plan to have.

In case you're interested, this is the color our dining room will  be, although it's a bit more vibrant in reality (excuse the random picture of Steve).

 

And this is our dining room table, without the leaves in it, as it looked in our first apartment. With it's three chairs that are actually bar stools cut down to size. Which reminds me, if anyone knows of some chairs for free or cheap, please let us know.

Dining Room

I guess it's been awhile since the last time I posted anything about my (our) plans for the house, but I saw some ideas today and wanted to see if anyone had opinions or suggestions.


I was thinking about the dining room (look here for an overview) and about how in the world we will fill it. I LOVE our dining room table, but other than that and the THREE, yes three, chairs we have that don't match it, I don't know what else to put in there. I wanted to buy a hutch, but at this point I feel like we'll never be able to afford one. My grandmother has a hutch/china cabinet and buffet that she's selling that I had written off as not my taste, but I took some time to look at it the other day and realized that I actually like the set, plus they're much more in our price range than new ones would be. You can see them in these pictures.

 

They're a lighter wood than our table, but maybe we could revamp them like this...

 

 Or would it look better just refinished in a darker color stain? And how hard would that be? Anybody know? It's like glossy and majorly shellacked. 

I also really liked this artwork from BHG.com

 

You could do it with scrapbook paper or wallpaper samples. 

While looking at that, I also found this idea for cheap artwork which I like for our laundry room (which is the next room "before" I'll be posting. 

 

Please share thoughts and ideas!

Before...Dining Room

So I thought I'd give you all a preview of what we'll be doing in the next couple months (for explanation, see here). These pictures are of the "Pretty Room" which is largely unused right now. The room wraps around the kitchen. You can see that the current decorating style is definitely not me

This is the view from the one opening from the kitchen.

The door on the left is the front door. The other is a closet.

The picture quality isn't great here because it was so sunny. I love that!

The wall that the secretary is against is a shared wall with the kitchen. You can see how the room wraps around to the left.

View from the other opening into the kitchen. The glass door leads into the "Big Room."

View from the Big Room. You can see how the room wraps around the kitchen.

Our plan is to make this room into a dining room. I want to rip out the pink carpet and put in hardwood floor as soon as we can afford it. I want to paint this room green; the same green that we have in the basement now and had in our living room in the last apartment. I want to do the wall that the closet is in, or the wall that the secretary is on in white with the green swirls, like in the old apartment. The dining room table would go where the coffee table is now. I want to get some shelves, maybe a hutch eventually. Maybe something like this...


In the little area between the kitchen and the big room, we'll probably put our computer desk.

I'm so excited about all of this, but it's so hard to have all these ideas and not be able to do anything yet. So, instead, I share them on here...