Dining Room Updates

I don't think I've shown you guys our dining room.  On my list of things to do is to add a page for our house tour with this blog, so hopefully you'll see our entire home at some point.

Here's what our formal dining room looked like with the previous owners stuff :

We hosted Thanksgiving at our home the very first year we moved in, so we painted the walls (pretty much the same color, but it brightened it up), painted the baseboards white, added furniture (dining room table, buffet, chairs), added a rug and curtains.  (And by we, I mean mainly me...this was during Chris's first Fall semester, and he was in full fledged work full time, get his MSEE full time, and go to Gator Football games full time mode!)  We moved in in April of 2009, and by November of 2009, this is what the dining room, with the table set, looked like :

This was prior to my blogging days, so please forgive the lack of full room shots.  Here's what the room looked like with our very first Thanksgiving guests :

Notice the empty walls?  Yeah...we ran out of steam / energy / money / care to do anything else in this room after that year.  I had a ton of ideas for what I wanted in there, but other projects became more important.

Well, the weekend before last, while we were out closing out Kalia's registry items, we came across a mirror from Pier 1 for $20.  A nice, mirror, cool shaped mirror...for $20.  Yes, please, I'll take it!  The reason it was $20 (instead of the initial $199)?!  It was a vanity/dresser mirror that no longer had said dresser / vanity to go with it.

Easy solution.  We just measured and attached our own hardware on the back.

Oh, and it had some scratches / dings on it, which were all fixable.  Just a little stain later, and the mirror was good as new.  My preggo brain forgot to take any good before shots of this...sorry!!

I told Chris I wanted to white wash or yellow wash it so the wood itself didn't just blend in...to give it more pop, but Chris put his foot down.  He said we're hanging the mirror, and if after Kalia gets here, you want to tackle another project, fine...but this looks good enough the way it is.

It actually amazingly matches our dining room furniture really well.  And those two picture frame ladders on either side we've had for forever.  They've been in a closet since we moved here, just waiting to find the perfect spot.

Do you see those two little books on top of the buffet?

I got the red one for our first Thanksgiving and had everyone write down what they're thankful for that year.  Not only is it a good way to reflect back on the year, and for us to look back at who celebrated what holidays with us, it's a great keepsake memorabilia that I know we'll keep for forever and read through.  The very first entry in there is my Papaw, who passed away the day before we left for Hawaii.  He wrote in our book " God has blessed me with so very much. The thing I'm most thankful for is a loving family.  Pop Paw Hannan".  I'd write more on how great of a man my Pop Paw was, but my pregnancy hormones are kicking in, and I need to move on or I'm not going to finish this post!

Whew...anyways, the brown book my Dad and T. Mom got me for Christmas, so once the red book gets filled, we'll move onto the cool brown one.  Such a fun way to preserve family get togethers!

Here's a shot of the entire dining room, which is what we see when we walk in from the garage :

For those of you that are super observant, yes, there is a dining room chair missing.  It's in the daybed room parked in front of my sewing machine, so that when I get motivated to sew, everything's all ready.  I think the chair is collecting dust in there these days.

Notice that cool little box on the right of the picture?  It's a R&Y Augousti desk box that I won in a giveaway from Elizabeth Sullivan's Blog.  She's the interior designer whose idea I stole copied to make my nursery room bookshelves.  It was such a cool, fun thing to win because it's definitely not anything I'd normally feel justified spending the $$ on, but to win a unique piece?  Sign.me.up!

And yes, the expansive wall on the other side of the dining room is like the elephant in the room.  It's huge and empty still, but hey, one wall at a time, right?!  I actually know pretty much exactly what I want to do on the other side...you know, one day!

So what do you guys think of our dining room?  I know a lot of people have given up on the idea of formal dining rooms to have more 'fun' rooms, but a formal dining room was important for us.  We have so much family and love the idea of being able to host family dinners on our own!  To give you perspective, this room sits caddy corner to my horrible Palm-Tree-room-that-will-someday-become-a-game-room.

Hope everyone's having a great week so far!  Happy Wednesday!

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