I mentioned quite a few weeks ago that we made some fun layout decisions for our main floor. Instead of keeping two sitting rooms and a formal dining room, we decided to turn our "den" into the main and only sitting room, turn our formal dining room into my studio and turn our living room into our dining room! Sound confusing enough? Check out
this post for a quick visual of what I mean. :)
Two weekends ago, Jon and I got a burst of energy and decided to finally paint over the beige walls in the new studio and dining room and start the steps to bringing these spaces to life. One of the most helpful strategies we've done in our home is that whenever we decide to paint a room, we also replace all outlets, switches, cover plates, vents and doorknobs in order to give the space a completely fresh look. We love saying goodbye to mix-matched plates, brass vent covers and doorknobs from the 70's that don't work anymore! -- Each time we do this it completely transforms the space and takes out the "
grunge" feeling from living in an older home and really brings out the charm! You can see from the photos below how dark and grungy this space felt before. The first photo is from the original house listing when we bought it and the remaining are from right before we got to prepping and painting. :)
For the dining space, we decided we wanted to really create a beautiful central entertainment room that would be suitable for hosting a large dinner and friends. We also decided that since most of our vision for the main floor includes a lot of neutrals that we should go ahead and take the plunge at embracing color and really make this room a statement! -- That we did! I brought home a huge stack of paint samples from Lowe's, we taped them on the wall, and took about 2-3 days to decide what color was best. Even then, last minute we changed our minds and went with this super striking Emerald color from Pantone.
Emerald was 2013's color of the year, by the way! This color is surprising and refreshing. I was super nervous about it beforehand but after seeing it on the walls during the day and during the night, I fell in love. It's gorgeous and is SO fun. I can't wait to really get my hands on this room and get it furnished!
My vision is to have a massive bright white table, metal chairs, some funky faux hide rugs, a beautiful gallery wall AND as a project for down the road, we want to do a huge built in bar area complete with a fridge, glassware display and all the fixings for cocktails, mocktails, coffee, soda, and cocoa. Jon and I have definitely spent a fair share of time in this room imagining the space and we can't wait to see some of these projects begin! But first, we're just focusing on the tables!!
Also, just as a fun and quick side note, as you may notice in these pictures we've strung bulb lights from the ceiling. These were actually left-over lights from our wedding in 2010, originally purchased at Target. There currently isn't any electrical wiring done in this room so to add some pizazz and light, we went with an "outdoor restaurant" look by swaging the lights. It makes the room look so beautiful at night! -- It's also SUPER easy! We used screw in hooks to hold the lights in place and just made sure to make them tight so no one would bump their head on them or get strangled! Twinkle lights do wonders!
LEFT TO DO IN THE DINING ROOM
* Paint walls
* Replace all outlets, plates, switches and vent covers
* Touch up the white trim
* Buy tables and chairs
* Rugs!
* Add in curtains
* Run electricity and add in lighting above the tables
* Work on the "bar" project
* Put together a gallery wall
* Get creative and add something surprising to this room
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