Fine Dining

Ok, here we go. If you've been following the progress in my dining room in the last couple of posts, today's the big day. Here is what my dining room looked like before I moved in:


The door on the left is a small closet (yes, in the dining room), lined with vintage wallpaper. I'd show it to you but it's currently busy serving other customers fulfilling its storage duties and is not feeling very photogenic.

As with EVERY OTHER WALL IN MY HOUSE, the walls were beige. There's nothing wrong with beige, but believe me, living in a beige bubble eventually starts to wear on a person!

And that light fixture is woefully inadequate. But don't worry, I have some ideas for sprucing it up to eventually use it somewhere more appropriate.

And finally, the moment we've all been waiting for... the 'finished' room:


I should note (before someone who knows me comments below!) that I very rarely actually use this room as a dining room. It's usually my 'office', and that armoire in the corner is full of office-y things like my printer and office supplies. So I set the table just for you - it would hardly do to show you a picture of it with my laptop on the table, now would it?! :)

As I mentioned the other day, after the painting was done I was ready to swap out the old, undersized light fixture. This pendant is something I made a couple of years ago, it used to hang in the dining room of my last apartment:


I originally used a lamp kit to light it, but now that I'm in a house, I hard-wired it in.

I first found the idea for this light via ReadyMade, but the instructions are on Instructables. The light is actually a Danish design from the early '70s called the IQ Light . (If you go there and look at all the variations, I think mine was the 80 piece version - so if you're thinking of making one of your very own, be prepared for blisters!!)

That's it for now. I still have a few other projects lined up for this room (a piece of furniture I want to make over to use as a sideboard, some desperately-needed art/mirror/whatever for all those bare walls...). And I know there are a lot of shades of wood going on here, but I'm working on it! For one thing, the table and chairs have had many many lives in many different places, and the chairs at the very least are coming to the end of their lifespan, so I may have to do something about that one of these days.


Any thoughts? Comments on the colour? Suggestions for those bare walls?

Progress - and a quick peek

Hello! It's been awhile. You'll have to excuse my absence, but ever since my last post, my days have been consumed with addressing the problem I found there. I spent the entire month of February, it seems, with a scraper in my hand. Eventually, those walls I showed you ended up like this:



Hallelujah. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Probably a little of both. But once the scraping began, there was no easy way to end it. I definitely didn't want to just patch over the problem and get on with the painting, because I didn't want the new paint to peel right off. So I carefully scraped the two walls back to the bare plaster, to start with a 'clean slate' (these two are exterior walls, the other two dining room walls didn't have the same issues).

And now, as of yesterday, the painting is complete! Here's a sneak peek of the colour:


I think it looks pretty grey in this pic, but it's actually a greyish green by Behr called Verdigris. I'm about to replace the light fixture, so stay tuned for full room pics tomorrow (provided the light swapping goes off without a hitch!).

Un-Painting

As I recently mentioned, I've had the urge lately to get painting. The boring beige that covers most of my walls has worn out its welcome.

I thought I'd start with my dining room(/office), so I picked out a colour. It's a small room. 'It'll be easy', I thought. 'A quick project'. Right.

To start things off, I wanted to fill some of the nail holes that the last paint job had just painted right over. So I started in one corner. 'Hmmm, what's this bubble?' I wondered. And then, all of a sudden, I was looking at bare plaster, as years and years worth of paint layers came sliding off the wall in large sheets. This is what de-lamination looks like, boys and girls:

(notice the stack of paint 'sheets' piled on the window sill)

So I turned to my trusty friend Google for advice, and together (along with some further detective work - AKA scraping) we decided that it's most likely the result of (hopefully old) water damage, as evidenced by the water stains on the plaster, and some mildew spots in the area below the window sill. Plus the cracking/peeling problem I first noticed seems to just be mainly around this window, which is also directly underneath where the porch roof meets the wall (remember my fun flashing adventure?).

Anyway, to tackle it properly, I've first got to get all the loose bits off (basically scraping until I'm out past the edge of the water marks). So I decided to make a game of it, a little something I like to call 'who can carve the biggest slice?' And guess what? - I won! Fun times, let me tell you.


It's a good thing I was the type of kid who loved peeling sunburns.

(And for those of you keeping score at home, under the beige paint I found dark red, more beige, pea soup green, emerald green, and peacock blue. None of which are going back on the walls once I get this project back on track)

At this point I think the next step is just to clean it up, patch with wall compound, and then prime it all (and hope for the best). And I'm REALLY hoping it's just this section of wall that needs so much work...

So much for a 'quick, fun project'.

:S