Dining Room Progress - A Sorta Before and After

This isn't really a good before and after for a few reasons:

1) I use the dining room all the time to take pictures of miscellaneous food and objects. (Thanks Alex for pointing that out the other day.) So you've pretty much already seen it. 

2) I just posted a bunch of pictures of the dining room in the last post. So this one will probably bore you.

3) It's still a work in progress and probably will be for the next few years. Isn't that always the case?

I'll start off by showing you the actual, fo-real MLS picture of the dining room before we bought the house. It's a teeny picture but you can still appreciate all of the glorious ugliness.

We called it the house of beige. Wall-to-wall beige carpeting. Beige walls. Beige trim. Beige overload. Eek!

Now I'll show you a few pictures from the day we moved in. I have no idea why there are ugly lawn chairs in the dining room. Oh wait, maybe because we had no other furniture yet?

This is the view of the dining room as you are walking into it from the kitchen. And you can see, even more beige.

This is the view as you walk in from the living room. It's actually a pretty big room, bigger than our kitchen that's for sure. 

From this angle you can see into the kitchen a little bit. You might also notice painted outlet covers, ugly metal heating grates, patchy walls, raw wood trim on the windows, plain baseboards, and a big, brass light fixture. Yuck.

And here is how the room is looking as of yesterday:

The first thing we did was rip out the ugly, stained carpeting. We found some original birch floors underneath that were in really good shape. Next we painted the walls a buttery yellow colour called Sweet Buttercup (from Home Depot). It took buying three gallons of three different shades of yellow before I settled on this one. I know yellow isn't for everyone, but after analyzing these yellow inspiration pictures, I knew it was the way to go. We also painted all of the window trim, door trim, wooden valences, and baseboards a crisp white. We replaced all of the heating grates and outlet covers with new white ones and built up the baseboards with some extra trim. 

We made our first major furniture purchase and splurged on this custom harvest table and chair set from Camlen Furniture. It was worth the investment. We chose the 6-foot long table with two, 2-foot extensions for either end in Starburst White. We chose the hand-planed finish for the top of the table and the extra large table legs. I am so happy with it. The only down side is that the colour of the wood has changed over time. It used to match the medium-brown colour of the bamboo blinds but has become more and more red over time. Oh well. You can't really get mad at wood.

We replaced the light fixture with a white chandelier (um, those are really hard to find) and centred it over the table. We hung my favourite bamboo roll-up shades of all time in the window for some privacy.

After shopping around for-ever we finally found the cutest window-pane cabinet at a shop in Toronto. I loooooove it.

I found and framed four botanical prints to fill in the empty corner. I probably didn't need to add that part since I posted about it this morning.

This is the view into the living room.

I found this set of boxes at Homesense before Christmas and thought I could stack them here (for now) until I find the perfect chippy, old bench. I've been keeping my camera in the top box on the left and all of my camera gear in the top box on the right.

I shopped the house for a few little accessories. A plant in a drawer and some old magazines.

I found this large dragonfly at Pottery Barn. It was the only item in the store that I could afford at the time. Heh heh heh.

So that's where the dining room is so far. My list of things I still want to do is kinda long. Here it is:

- replace plain, wood dining room door with a french door

- refinish floors

- add quarter round to baseboards

- add large, chunky crown moulding

- find a rug for under the table to warm up the space

- hang the antique window over the cabinet or over the doorway

- possibly add curtains to the window

- find an old, chippy bench to sit under the framed pictures

- find a large tree to brighten up the other little (hidden) corner

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Here's a source list in case I missed anything and you all of a sudden want to copy this exact look.

Source List:

Wall colour - Buttercup Yellow, Home Depot

Trim colour - Simply White, Benjamin Moore

Chandelier - Sears Canada

Table and Chair Set - Camlen Furniture

Chair cushions - Linens N' Things

Wood-framed botanical prints - Muskoka Living Interiors

Bamboo roll-up shade - Linens N' Things

White-framed botanical prints - Frames from Michaels, prints from an encyclopedia

Window-pane cabinet - Flik and Company

Heating grates and outlet covers - Home Depot

Trim for baseboards - Home Depot

Candlesticks - Homesense

White flower pot - Ikea

Set of boxes - Homesense

Dragonfly - Pottery Barn

White drawer pot - Zellers

White pitchers & dishes - Homesense, Muskoka Living, Hilltop Interiors, Ikea, Pier One

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Thank you so much for taking the time to read this dreadfully long post. :)  I'll be sharing it here:

Amaze Me Monday @ Dittle Dattle, Metamorphosis Monday @ Between Naps on the Porch, Show Off Your Cottage Monday @ House in the Roses, Tuesday's Treasures @ My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Anything Related @ All Thingz Related, Good Life Wednesdays @ A Beach Cottage, Show and Tell @ Blue Cricket Design, Show and Tell Friday @ My Romantic Home, Feature Yourself Friday @ Fingerprints on the Fridge