Dining Room

Once again, a few weekends ago I had this idea (this is becoming a bad habit of mine) of kinda sorta re-doing our dining room. Our house was the same color throughout when we bought it and its always kinda bugged me. I want the rooms to be all their own. I want you to walk through my house and have a different feel for each room you walk in. 

But, if we're being honest here, you (or at least I do) have to be in a mood to paint.. and that mood seldom comes… especially when you paint a room in the house and tell yourself you're never gonna do this again. 

Yea, you need a good 9-12 months to forget how much you hate to paint.

The time came, I had a vision, so to the paint counter we went. 

Agh! The more I look at this photo, the more I dislike what it was!

If you'll look at the window before ^, you can see that I chose to completely cover them up with roman shades. I hate to talk down on the company who painted this house before we bought it (previous owners had the inside and outside completely painted), but the paint job all over  is t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e. 

It really is just awful that someone would put their name on the job. Anyways, can you tell its a super sore subject around here??

Ha!

 We have been left to "clean up the mess" so to speak. 

The windows have paint all over the glass, and the windows hadn't been cleaned in Lord knows how long, so I completely just wanted them covered, and honestly thought it wasn't even worth my time to try and deep clean.

So I didn't! 

(I didn't even bother taking a before photo because I had no hope)

Nat got the razor blade out and started scraping the paint off the glass, and then I spent about 2 hours doing the same (and could totally spend many more hours scraping paint off) and then taking the windows completely apart to scrub, 

(little shout out to Norwex… LOVE my Norwex window rag, makes cleaning windows a million times easier.)

and wowza! 

I couldn't believe how they turned out! I was SO excited that the possibility of open windows+curtains.

Gotta love the crazy mess that comes with re-doing.

Nat has also been, slowly but surely, replacing all the light switches and plugs in the house from old school ivory to lovely bright white. It makes a world of difference. Not to mention I can actually plug stuff in and it won't fall out!

(Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Anywaysss… Heres the before:

and after:

I still need to work on something for the wall. Theres a lot of open wall-age in there, so I will be on the look out!

We also re-painted all the trim and the bottom half paneling, and the stair rail. It still hasn't been put back up as we (Nat is) are gonna re-do the hardware. 

I absolutely love the way it turned out.