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!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.


I'm linking up to the parties on my sidebar...go check them out!

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Awhile back, my Grandparents gave me this gold mirror and told me I could do with it what I wanted.  They moved into a new home, so I got some of their old goodies.

I loved the details of the mirror, but the gold wasn't really working with what I wanted it for.  While Chris was priming the hallways a few weeks back, I had him go ahead and prime this mirror too.  I'm lucky I have a husband that goes along with most things!

And then I went to town on it.  I don't have any of the step by step pictures because I just kept making stuff up and adding on another layer.  I wanted it to capture the color scheme I'm using for Kalia's room (that's where this will eventually wind up), so my first layer was a pinkish mixture.  I broke all of the rules and mixed my red water based stain with my white paint, and added a little bit of gray into it.  Then I slopped on layers of my blue from Kalia's closet and dresser mixed with white, followed by some dry brushing of the gray we used to paint Kalia's walls, and finally ended with some dry brushing of just the blue color all on its own.  I added in black paint around the border to sort of give it the black frame look, but still allow the pinkish concoction I came up with show through.  I used my glaze mixed with a little bit of black and slopped some of that on there too.

Seriously, there was nothing neat at all about painting this mirror.  There was no game plan either...I just wanted a layered look that incorporated her room colors.  I stopped when I liked it!

Ready to see?

On this next one, you can see the black dry brushing I did on the outside part to give it more of a black framed look.  I didn't go all black though, I definitely wanted the layers to show through.

Here's a picture of the whole mirror.  Mirrors are so hard to photograph...sorry for the lack of good entire shots!!

And here she is in her new home...

I know, the lighting is off in this picture...and I can't show you the whole wall just yet.  I've got another project to reveal first!  You can tell that this is hanging above Kalia's dresser / changing table though...right across from her bookshelves.

What do you think of my mirror transformation?  Do you like the layered look or would you have preferred just to keep it one simple color?  I'm really into layering paints right now...I just love the effect that it creates!

Hope everyone is having a great week so far...Happy Tuesday!

P.S. Thanks so much for all of your kind comments on my maternity pictures!  So sweet!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.


I'm linking up to the parties on my sidebar...go check out everyone else's transformations!

Closet Part 2 : Door Makeover

Back in April, before most of you knew I existed, I did a quick transformation of our closet doors from this:

to this:

Please ignore my dirty laundry in the background...oops!

The silver was a nice little quicky upgrade, but I didn't do it right, and the silver scratched off easily.  This is what led me to research everything to re-do the door hardware once I found the actual color I wanted (it's even a comment of mine to my good friend Erin at the bottom of this post back in April...so many ideas swirling around constantly in this head of mine!).

So now that we've learned, and been successful at, re-doing hardware, it was time to upgrade this mirror, again, as part of our 8 million part closet renovation.  Besides, they were already off from adding in the shoe shelves, so now was as good a time as any to get it done right.

Step 1:  Get a hot guy to Lightly sand and then spray on primer.

 Step 2: Sit and read instructions on desired color spray paint bottle to make sure that your impatient wife is correct in saying that as soon as the primer dries (~10 minutes), it's okay to spray on the color.

Step 3:  Spray on the actual color.

Step 4: Spray on clear top coat / protector.

Step 5: Scrape off tons and tons of paint on the mirror with a sharp razor (not fun...perhaps taping should be step 1 the next go round).

Step 6: Hang Doors!

And one from the other angle so you can see how much better this goes with our existing vanity area and mirror:

And a rundown of the deets for those of you who are interested:

Primer:  RUST-OLEUM's Clean Metal

Spray Paint: RUST-OLEUM's Metallic all-surface paint in oil rubbed bronze

Top Coat:  RUST-OLEUM's Crystal Clear Enamel

Hunky Husband:  Not available for purchase.  Sorry ladies.

This time around took a lot longer than the last go round, but they don't scratch and look SO much better.  Ahh...the simple things in life.  Now onto part 3...sigh.

I'm linking up to the linky parties on my links tab...go check out what everyone else is creating!