The Dining Room Before and After

When we bought our house,

it was in such a disarray.

The house walls were covered in dark paneling

and square gold marbled mirrors, and fake brick paneling.

I was a sight to behold.

We worked together as a family to get 

walls stripped and torn out to make the rooms

bigger and make the kitchen much larger.

Such a lovely sight really.

I had lots of imagination when I first saw this house.

I went home and with graph paper and pencil I drew out the 

proposed plans for the kitchen.

The bar that you see here we pulled out.

There also was a jutted out section in the wall next to this

bar, you can see it framed in next to the bar on the wall.

I decided that we needed to take the 

jutted out section off the wall and make the wall completely

flat, like all walls should be.

We discovered as we pulled the section off

there was a flue at the top of this.

It jutted out in this room we now call the dining room,

and the room next to it, that is now our guest house.

We pulled all this off,

and started pulling the bricks off one by one.

I never thought of the fact that at the bottom of the

bricks were lots of soot.

We pulled brick by brick, and all of a sudden there was a big

SWOOSH

 there was soot everywhere.

And especially all over us.

Each day as we came to work on the house,

we brought lots of soot back with us.

Our photos show this,

I couldn't get things clean fast enough.

Our dining room is such a fun room now.

I could never have imagined that it could be this nice

after knowing what it looked like when we bought it.

We took the floors down to the original wood floors.
Pulling up one layer of indoor/outdoor carpet,
then two layers of very old linoleum,
then a layer of pressed wood, nailed down with
16 penny nails.
It was a chore for sure, and
weeks for me to get the floor to this point.

The room has had many looks over the years,
I first wallpapered the dark paneling
with a white and pink stripe
but then as time has passed, we sheet rocked
and I faux painted the walls to look like
Venetian plaster.

I have liked these walls the best,
and this is how it will stay until
I either die or move away.

I love to decorated my walls with pictures that
we have purchased on our travels.
these are from Italy.

And these are a combination of Paris, London,
 Venice, and Rome.
Here is the wall that had the flue on it.
So glad we pulled it out
even though the mess took me a while to
clean up. Lots of soap and water.

This is the dining room looking from the
kitchen.  I so love how cozy it feels.  It isn't
a big room, but it does have that
come in and enjoy feel.

Well for now this is our dining room.

I will add another post on how it got to this point.

Ciao,

Robin