Dining Details

Well now that the dining room is coming along, I felt that we needed a few details to make it feel a bit more lived in. Especially because we are still dealing with some very incomplete rooms that you have yet to see, it's imperative that I distract myself from their existence at times.

As you recall the room looked a bit bare:

 

better, but bare. I knew exactly what I wanted on the wall next, a mirror! I looked several places like Hobby Lobby, Target, and Lowes but could never find that perfect mirror. They were either too narrow, too big or too round. Then I went to the Home Goods store and struck mirror gold, what do you think?

And that weird photo angle...that was on purpose...really.  It gives the photo character lol.

Then I ventured on over to Target to pickup some additional touches like these beautiful place mats:

These Fieldcrest Matlasse window panels:

and these curtain tie backs...or not quite tie backs. I'm sure they have a real name but here they are:

 Oh, holdbacks, that's what they're called

And remember these vase fillers that I bought a while ago:

Well those along with these leafy things:

created quite a nice look.

Well a look that I can accept enough to move on to another room...for now at least :-)

Tatum


I'm linking to French Country Cottage...Go visit her!

Let There Be Light!

Dining light that is...and not stupid skinny out of date style torchiere light. It would be one thing if the torchiere looked like this:

 

Or this:

 

Or even this:

But no, ours looked like:

Just look at it! Looking skinny and unpleasant from all angles:

If our dining room had any chance whatsoever of reaching it's full potential then it needed a serious upgrade. So I began to look around for the perfect fixture to fill our hole...ceiling hole that is:

So what did I do? I got on line to look at chandeliers! I spotted a fixture at Lowes that I thought would work perfectly and so I ventured on over there and took this picture to send to Chris:

 

 And after work we bought it!

And here's what it looked like soon thereafter:

And Chris went to work on it immediately! And this time (for all of you who've noticed his sexy shirtless self) with a shirt on!

Step 1:

 Step 2:

And just like that, the green eyed monster was banished!

MUUUCCHH better! On to the next task...

Tatum

Dining Decor

Remember my dining room and all of the many changes? It first looked like this:

Kind of splochy with ugly wallpaper trim. And then we took the ugly trim off:

 

And then the room went through some CRAZY orange color changes that you can read about here.  Just to ultimately end in this color below:

Now the next step was to make this room interesting. Once the paint dried and I'm certain several weeks later we purchased a couple items to make the wall less boring.

 

Candle wall sconces from Target! These are perfect because if they aren't holding candles, they can hold flowers! So after spiffing up the walls a bit, I ran into the kitchen and grabbed some place settings and a plain set of white dishes that I purchased from Walmart for only $6.00 on sale added some flowers and made the room a little bit more welcoming!

It's not the greatest but it's a start! And it made Miss Impatient (me) feel a little bit better. But what's up with that skinny white light fixture! Lets take a closer look:

 It's an ugly torchiere!!! Why in the world is this skinny ugly light fixture in this room that is trying it's best to progress? There are many other unfinished rooms in this house that could temporarily house this homely light fixture. It has got to go! Stay tuned!

Tatum

Jalepeno or Jalepenyo or howlepenyo

If I had one of those tilde things to put over the 'n' I wouldn't have had to write Jalepenyo. I'm sure you know the right way to pronounce it but for some reason when I wrote Jalepeno it just didn't look right to me. It looked like it would sound like jailapeno. O.k enough with the rambling. Why am I focusing on that word Jalepeno? It's not because of this:

or this:

But because of this:

Jalepeno is another beautiful paint color that we chose for the dining room. Though you might have thought that Jalepeno was green, instead it's another successful hue of orange, by Sherwin Williams.

 

 There's Mr. Handyman, fixing our gray primer, sunshine orange debacle with the new perfect shade of orange called Jalepeno. 

What do you think? it's perfect right? Isn't that the point of an accent wall, to stand out? My mother said "I don't like that color, it's like the room just abruptly stops". But that can't be the case, it has to be right because this is our second color choice. There's no way we could be wrong again; those darn paint fans!!

Yea, we turned the wall brown soon thereafter. We're pretty sure that this is right. After all, aren't the pops of color suppose to come from the decor and accessories? Even if that's not the official rule, I declare it the new rule of our home lol!


Tatum

Why Paint Once?

When you can paint two times, or maybe even three times...THE SAME WALL!!! As you might have guessed by now. We have several projects going on at once here.  The kitchen, the dining room, the front porch area etc. Why you may ask? Because there are so many things that need attention and I have a serious problem focusing on just one. Especially when while working on that one project I see the others lurking in the background!!

Chris totally has the right idea about working on one thing at a time. He's convinced that I have some weird form of house attention deficit disorder...and I kind of do. But I can't help it and some of it is not my fault. For example, have you ever been fooled by a paint fan? While looking through that paint fan at that perfect shade of green for your kitchen, you oh so gleefully make your way to the store to get the paint. When you get home, you open the can, get the roller to put it on your kitchen wall and it looks like this!

We can call this electric, neon, blind me green! Yea that's exactly the color that I want in the kitchen. How frustrating... so since this was not right, why not proceed with that perfect shade of orange that we purchased for the accent wall in the dining room! Yea that's an idea, just keep making progress. Oh, and lets not forget to use that gray primer that the guy told us to get to make the burnt orange pop!

That's right folks. What you are observing here is failed attempt number 2. Look at that crazy flat looking super bright orange color! And the gray primer was a joke. That orange would have looked bad either way. We'd have to wear sunglasses just to eat in this dining room. So as the photo shows, I proceeded with taking down that hideous trim. I know what you might be thinking. Why on earth was I painting when their was still trim on the wall. Now, I never said that I was a professional at this home renovation thing; and I do have that little focus on one thing problem. But hey, check out that mighty fine trim removal job!!

Progress baby!!...kind of :-)

Tatum