The Dining Room: Help from Kate & Hurricane Irene

This is what it looked like before we moved in.

The dining room is smack dab in the middle of our house and has openings to the living room, kitchen, and entryway, which makes it a key space. The heart of the home, if you will. This made choosing a wall color sort of difficult. The photo on the right shows what the dining room looked like in the previous occupants' hands. The wall color was a nice cream and the trim was actually white, making this the ONE room in the house that didn't make me want to barf. The downside though, is that the room has lots of nice features that the monochromatic color scheme wasn't highlighting. Time for more paint!


Originally, I wanted blue in the dining room. Navy seemed too dark for our already-kind-of-dark little house, and light blue or teal next to the living room wall color made it look a bit circus-like. Drew's aunt suggested sage-green, which seemed to work well for the space. We found the perfect shade of green (again, why do they have to make so many paint colors? Why can't they just make the ones I like?) and...

We were so darn tired of painting that we just couldn't bring ourselves to paint any more. Just looking at that roll of blue tape and the piles of drop cloths made me shudder. We needed a miracle to get our motivation up again.

That motivation miracle came in the form of... Hurricane Irene. And the fabulous Kate. And wine.

This is Kate. I went to law school with her and she was in town briefly the weekend of Irene, attending a wedding and moving out of her apartment (and giving us her futon!). She was staying with us and so got roped into our Hurricane Irene plans. Did we huddle up and read books? Did we play board games by candlelight? Did we catch up on all the fabulous stuff bar exam preparation that we had each spend the summer doing? Of course not. Drew and I conscripted Kate to paint the dining room with us. She is clearly a good sport - in the photo to the left, she is sitting on a very strange bench/art installation by Jamaica Pond a few days before the hurricane. Only a good sport sees a weird bench and hops in gleefully. She agreed to dive into our painting project with almost as much glee.

This is Hurricane Irene - remember Irene?  The wind was blowing, the rain was pouring, but we mercifully did not lose power - not even once! There were a few tense moments with a giant tree outside our window, but it held together and we painted on.

The Academy Experiential Ed department
would not approve of these provisions. 

Armed with plenty of provisions, we went for it. Note the choices of provisions here - cereal, almonds, raisins, and wine. I also got some bottled water and some cans of tuna. Once I found out Kate would be hurricaning with us, I went out and bought more wine. Disaster prep is not one of my fortes, clearly. It's a really good thing we didn't actually experience any hurricane-related disasters or we all would have been covered in paint, with only chianti and trail mix and tuna to tide us over. Oh well. I'll work on my disaster prep for next time.





Anyhow, the dining room has several architectural features that make painting a true pain in the neck. First, it has a built-in china cabinet that is original to the house and has been left unpainted. This is a plus in general, but very worrisome when you're slinging paint all over the place. Second, it has a chair rail and extra-thick crown molding. Again, very nice features, but lots of work. Third, it has three doorways and a giant bay of windows. More trim. If you've ever painted trim, you know how rough it is. As Brendan said, "I don't think anything could be more annoying or fussy than this trim." Amen.

Boom. Time for wine. 

Kate, Drew, Irene, and I painted like we've never painted before. We held our collective breath around the china cabinet and got the room finished in record time.

We found an antique gate leg table in a shop on Cape Cod for an amazingly low price and, with the help of Drew's mom, got it back to Boston and into our dining room.

It has two leaves in the middle and two leaves that pop up on the sides, making this a truly gigantic, Thanksgiving dinner-worthy table. We only have four chairs, which complicates things somewhat, but we'll get there.

We also got a sewing machine from Drew's Nana, which is cleverly disguised in the table beneath the clock. More on my sewing pursuits in the next post.

Ta da!

We successfully kept all the paint off the china cabinet!

View from the living room into the kitchen.
(I made that table runner!)

 

This is the table with the center leaves in and the side leaves down. It's HUGE.

The sewing machine is reminiscent of "Inspector Gadget" or the Batmobile,
but in a Suzy Homemaker kind of way. 

So that's the dining room. I hope everyone enjoys a beautiful Saturday - I'm off to Home Depot!

Updates: Living Room, Bedroom, Entryway

Hello! I've been scolded a few times lately for not posting any updates on our house. It's been a busy two months, with both of us starting new jobs and adjusting to new schedules. In Drew's case, this has also involved getting used to hanging out with fourteen year olds every day (better him than me). But we're back on the blogging wagon (fingers crossed) and we have lots of progress to report!



First, the living room. We did a lot in the living room right away, so there's not too much here that's different. We moved one of our antique chests into the place of the sad little table (which has been relegated to the basement), which makes the awkward chair look less awkward. What do you think? We still need to add something above the chair and on the wall to the left of it, above the TV.

We also acquired this great rocking armchair from Drew's parents. I sewed some arm covers (more on my sewing prowess later) and we put it in the corner where the sticks used to be. We found that painting (it's of Paris, if you can't tell from this angle) on the street in our neighborhood and took it. It's a little garish, but so are the walls.

Next up for this corner is to fix the lighting situation. That lamp from ikea was $6.99 or something and it lived in our old apartment, but it looks super goofy right there. I'm thinking a hanging lamp?

Also, note the backgammon set on the floor next to the chair. It looks cool, but we don't know how to play. Anyone who wants to come play backgammon totally should feel free.....

Next up - the entryway. The last time you saw the entryway, it had stuff everywhere. We've cleaned it up (except under the rolltop, obviously...) and painted the walls and trim, but we still aren't really feeling good about the space. I think replacing the shoe shelf with something more substantial, moving the painting over the desk, and putting some hooks on the wall will help, but I'm not convinced that the layout is right. If you have design sense, please tell me what to do.

View from the spare room. The living room is on the left.

We will hang the Boston poster eventually...

The painting is hanging on a pre-existing nail but will get put over the desk soon.    

So. Much. Blank. Wall. HELP. 

And the bedroom. We got a real live bed - no box spring on the floor for us anymore! No siree, we're grown-ups now. The bed has a headboard, which is awesome because it keeps our pillows from falling on the floor.

I've done some research on the whole bed-in-a-corner thing, and apparently it's pretty controversial. Some like it and some hate it. Some people say it's bad feng shui and that you'll wake up with a neck ache or your blood gets infected or something. At the end of the day though, we feel like it makes our bedroom more open and we're sleeping great. We think our blood is healthy. We're keeping the bed like this.

Then came the question of what to do in that big, gray corner. We decided on some hanging lights. Drew braved his worst fears (Ikea on a weekend) to come help me pick them out. I can't decide if I care enough about them functioning as lights to keep the cords there, or whether I'd like to hang them with wire/string and use the electrical components somewhere else in the house. If we keep them as lights, we'll corral the cords along the edge of the windows. What do you think?



Next up, I'll show you all the cool stuff we did in the dining room, our new-and-improved kitchen, and the newest and best surprise in the house, which involves the bathroom floor.

Happy Veteran's Day!