Scraplog

What I’ve Been Up To Part 1

As promised last time I blogged, here are some pictures of what I’ve been doing. These are not all the projects, just a couple :) I’m the kind of girl that needs to be doing several things simultaneously so I don’t get bored!

Last night, I (almost) completed a revamp of my dining room. I have been wanting to change things around in there for a little while now and finally started working on it again.

First things first, here is what it looked like last year:

When this picture was taken in September last year, I had just painted the walls and put everything back in the room. I’m still happy with the wall color, it’s sort of a gray/blue/green. I know, sounds crazy right? Seriously, it changes colors depending on the time of day. But everything else in the room had been that way since we moved in (May 2006), and I was ready for a change.

Since I can’t go buy new furniture whenever I want, I scrounged around the rest of the house to see what I could take from another room. I do this frequently; moving furniture from one room to another. It spices things up and creates a domino effect making the others rooms feel fresh too. In this particular instance, I wanted to move the previous china hutch to the laundry room because we need storage in there desperately (currently the detergent, bleach, and any other laundry related items are on the window sill which I hate!) and the hutch fits just right (I will show pictures of that another time because I painted the hutch a great color!). With the old hutch gone, this left a blank spot in my dining area. I really wanted a buffet so I looked around to see what I could find and came up with this:

This is a dresser I found on the side of the road last year and I picked it up. Hey, it was free! Once I got it home I realized why it was free. The drawers were falling apart, wouldn’t shut properly and (obviously) there were no handles. I used it downstairs in the basement for this past year for storage (after duct taping the drawers back together) and decided that this piece of furniture would work for the dining room to use as a buffet… but not in its present state. This is where I had to call in my husband for assistance!

First he ripped out all the drawers and guides (what was left of them!). Then he put new insides in including a shelf. Lastly, I painted it. I’m happy with how it turned out. And, we did all of this with materials we had on hand. I love free projects!

Another thing we added to the dining room was new shelves. I had bought these unfinished shelves at Pottery Barn Outlet in February (for $10 each!), had other plans for them, but decided they would work great in here. So once again I painted them and Jason hung them.

And lastly, the finished room. Like I said, I’m not quite done with it. I am still working on painting the rest of the table and chairs. So far, I have only finished the first table (we have two identical tables and 8 chairs). After 5 coats of paint on the first, I’m not really looking forward to getting the rest done. But we are having a Christmas party here on December 14th so that is my goal. We’ll see if I make it! And for those of you who cringe at the thought of painting wood, I bought them 4 years ago with the intent to paint them and are just now getting around to it. Besides, I like them better painted and that’s all that matters :) Okay, done ranting…

Other plans for the dining room… I would love to have a large rug, patterned curtains, and this light:

One can dream right?!

By the way, if you’ve made it through this whole post I’m impressed! I will try to post my Christmas projects soon. I just have to finish them :)