Dining Room

Piece by piece, one room at a time, I’m slowly making over my house. Making it mine. While all the crazy black Friday shoppers were wrapping their haul, I got to spend my long Thanksgiving weekend making over my dining room.

I started with the long skinny window on the back wall.  It’s too small to fit with curtains, and we use it as a shelf to display our old wine bottles. But the sunlight comes in around 630pm spring through fall shining blindingly into the eyes of anyone sitting opposite it, at the table. By 7, you can’t stand in the kitchen facing the window either.  The window needed something. I decided to try a frosted glass look. I bought a can of frosted glass spray “paint” and sprayed it on the window. Since the wine bottles don’t touch the glass, I don’t know that I needed to leave the sill clear while the window cured, but I wasn’t done with that wall, so I left it empty anyway. 

While my window cured, I prepared the room.  Curtains down, table moved, baseboards scrubbed, walls taped…All while being supervised by my big, orange cat.

My only Black Friday shopping consisted of a quick run to Home Depot for a gallon of paint.

I picked a teal blue for my walls – a color I had been crushing on for some time, trying to decide what walls I wanted to put it on. The dining room is small, so it didn’t take long to get the walls painted. I *LOVE* the color!  As the paint dried, I removed the tape and with Jerry’s assistance, re- installed curtain rods, outlet and light switch plates, and our plant basket turned fruit basket. 

I haven’t found the curtain fabric I want yet, so I re-hung the green ones that were already in the dining room. I still needed something to block the bright sunshine that comes in at the most inconvenient times. They don’t match, but they are better than nothing. I’m hoping to find material in a coppery brown color, and in that material that’s kind of satiny, but looks wrinkled? I have no idea what it’s called, but that’s what I want in there for curtains.

The wall with the frosted window was still empty… for this, I *really, really, really* wanted to do a brick wall – like, with real bricks. But, unfortunately, even the guy selling used ones on craigslist wanted a dollar a piece. Not exactly in my budget, when I calculated that I’d need about 800+. The faux brick panels were my second choice, but turned out to be just as expensive. I briefly considered making my own, with plaster, but decided against it, concerned that my kids would ruin it by banging their chairs into it too hard and too often. As a result of that action, the original wall paint was chipped away, badly. I didn’t want to imagine the mess of shattered plaster. 

Anyway, all that to say that I finally settled on a wallpaper option. I found a print that I really liked, realistic looking, the right color scheme, washable vinyl, and supposedly easy to remove. I wasn’t super thrilled about the idea of wallpaper, since I’ve  never used it and have heard it was a pain to hang, and worse to remove, and really, it just wasn’t the look that I wanted. But it was the right price. I like to keep my room re-do budget to about $200 or less, and with the need to still buy curtain fabric, I was already cutting it close.

I got to work with the wall paper, getting a big bucket to use for dipping since I didn’t have a tub close enough, scrubbing the wall, and chalking  a plumb line. I cut a section of the wall paper and got to hanging my first piece. I smoothed it out with a squeegee, wiped it off with a rag, and stepped back to take a look… The edges started lifting, the top right corner started peeling… this was not going to be fun. I tried getting it wetter with a squirt bottle. I tried smoothing it down, hard and fast. It wasn’t working. On the plus side (much sarcasm) it peeled right off without leaving any residue or paper behind. I scrapped the piece and tried again. The second piece went up and stayed up. No bubbles, no lifting or peeling. That was encouraging. The next section needed to be matched up to the bottom of the first. That was easy because it was a continuous vertical roll, so where I cut, it matched. I went to stick that one, and as I was smoothing, I noticed that it was wider than the piece I already placed. Did the first one shrink? The this one grow? I went with it, best I could and hoped they would match back up as it dried. I finished one vertical row before calling it a day. There were bubbles, and I wasn’t happy about it. But, I didn’t know what to do, so I left it and hoped that it would look fine in the morning. Somehow, over night the bubble smoothed itself down and the vertical strip looked ok. Encouraged, I got back to work, and even started picking up some speed as I got the hang of the pattern and was able to quickly match it side to side. It wasn’t bubbling. It wasn’t peeling or lifting. It was just working, and I was relieved. It wasn’t looking half bad either. I took a break for dinner, and that became my biggest regret. During my break, the temperature dropped, and I’m now convinced that this was the cause of the poor hanging job from the night before. After dinner, my hanging bubbled, peeled, lifted, shrank and or grew, etc. I should have put it on hold and waited for warmer day time temps but was determined to make it work, and be done with it. I finally got it all hung, and from across the whole dining room and kitchen, it looked pretty good, but as I got closer, I could see where the seams overlapped in one spot, and gaps where it shrank and shifted in other spots. It’s not terrible, and most people probably won’t notice unless they look for the mistakes, but they are pretty obvious to me. Hopefully I will get used to it.

The room is done, for now. I still need curtains that match the room, and I think it needs some wall art, but those will have to wait until I find what I want. I'll add photos of the completed room once I get them done.