2 years - dining room

Today is my second blog anniversary. Can't believe it has already been that long. Thanks for taking this journey with me, without you it wouldn't be the same!

Second in my two year recap is the dining room. It was a pretty easy transformation, especially compared to the kitchen, we just painted the walls, ceiling, window and door frames, crown and base moulding and called it a day. OK, now that I wrote down what we painted it sounds like a lot of work and it also took a while to finish it all. Of course we also swapped the chandelier for a more modern light fixture and the stained roman shades needed to go as well. The chandelier was the same model than the one in the kitchen, there was also a smaller one like that in the hallway. I managed to sell all three of them at a local flea market for $30. Yay! Tried to give it away for free on craigslist before but nobody came to pick them up...We already owned all the furniture except the chair and the side tables in the window nook so we didn't have to spend much on this room. The little side board under the orange poster I brought from Germany, I found it sitting next to the dumpster of my student dorm. Even back then I picked up furniture from the street. We managed to finish the dining room just in time for Thanksgiving 2010 and hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner for a group of friends...

 

walls

Yup, after living in our house a little over a year the first pictures are now hanging on the walls. Three in the dining room and one in the living room. Two of them are concert posters (OMD and Foo Fighters). Does that mean I'm stuck in my teenage decorating years? ;)

reading nook

We have two bay windows, one in the dining room and one in the living room. I have always loved bay windows and imagined myself sitting on a window seat and read. Although we have the windows we don't have any built-in window seats.

This is how the dining room/bay window looked before we started painting. Those shades were the yuckiest thing ever but we didn't throw them out for a while because we couldn't figure out what to put in its place and we needed the privacy. There is an apartment building on the side of the house and the tenants could look into our place when they are going in the basement to do their laundry.

We painted the walls in the bay window the same gray as the dining room and living room. It's Stonington Gray by Benjamin Moore. The calderesque mobile from CB2 and the floor lamp we already owned. The lamp used to stand next to one of our sofas in the old apartment and the mobile I had never taken out of its box. I saw it in an issue of Domino (R.I.P.) and had to have it. It's from a company named EQ3 and because there wasn't a store in my area I called up one and bought it sight unseen.

Next came the chair, it was a birthday present I gave myself last year and I got it at the DWR Annex in Secaucus. We live kind of close to it and I like to stop by there sometimes just to browse around...The little side tables are from CB2 as well. At first I thought they were a little too matchy matchy with the colors of the mobile but I really like them now.

So far I have not been sitting there to read but sometimes when I talk on the phone I sit there and watch the people walking by...

Seeing the pictures now I need to do something about the cord of the lamp...

happy thanksgiving!

Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving!

Although I'm more than a week late I still want to show you some pictures of our table. We were a total of nine people and had to put an extra table next to our dining table to fit everone. That's why I didn't have a table cloth that fits. Not that I have a lot of table cloths to choose from, I own 3. So off we went to Ikea to get a matching one for one that we already have. But we found out that they didn't carry that one anymore. Bummer! Waiting in line to pay for the other stuff we bought we passed the christmas wrapping paper and I just bought three rolls of brown packing paper to use it as my table cloth. To add some color I used colored paper as my placemats with a little Happy Thanksgiving stamp in one corner. I'm no Martha Stewart but I still like the outcome of my first Thanksgiving table.

dining room

The dining room is almost finished. On the other hand will anything ever be finished? At least everything is painted and all the random pieces that were floating around are stowed away. Just in time to host our first Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.

We still have to hang some artwork and I would like to change the glass in the cabinet doors to clear glass so you can see my china collection.