The steps below follow the order of the work for this workshop project.
Katie @ Lucky In Love is showing off her new dining room remodel.
when we first moved into our house, i knew which room had to be altered pronto. our dining area. the people who owned the house before us didn’t exactly have bad taste, just very different from our own. call me crazy, but i wasn’t interested in an octopus chandelier, merlot mixed with band-aid tan, and a chair rail for midgets.
the one thing the dining room had going for it was lots of great natural light. also, we were clearly lucky to inherit these faux white wood blinds all over the house!
so our first weekend as home-owners, we refinished our hardwood floors. you can read about that in this post.
two weeks later, dad came back to help kyle with the molding, and brought his handy saw. i created the game plan, we went to buy lumber and railing at home depot, and then they did all the hard work. nice trade off huh?
on to our fancy looking crown molding. i wish i had taken more pictures off this in progress! what you can’t tell from looking at these picture is that the molding is actually made of two pieces of wood. the guys used a blue chalk line to measure off the space they would be using. first they installed the base board onto the wall, with the top of the base board two inches below the ceiling. then the second piece was actual crown, that fit nicely at a 45 degree angle between the base and the ceiling. the overall effect is 5 inches of crown molding – very fancy!
the guys used a nail gun to secure the wood to the wall. this meant i had the very tedious job of filling the nail holes with wood putty. kyle used the caulk gun in three places on the molding. where the crown met the ceiling, where the crown met the base, and where the base met the wall. basically anywhere there is a seam.
then the guys ripped out the old chair rail which was way too low and made the room look awkward. you can see the white spackle that we used to cover any holes and make the wall smooth. they installed new chair rail at the recommended height of 36 inches. then (this is my go-to part!) we created the look of wainscotting by creating these boxes out of quarter round beneath the chair rail. a much cheaper option compared to actual wainscotting!
looking good guys! now, all we need is a few coats of paint. we chose martha stewart’s white picket fence on the bottom half of the room. we also gave everything in the room a coat of white while we were at it: base, crown molding, chair rail, and window frames.
now ideally, all the boxes would have been the same size, but the three walls in our dining room were all different. so the wall with the doorway got two skinnier boxes, the back wall with the most space got four regular boxes, and the wall with the long windows got three wide and short boxes. it might sound goofy, but my dad suggested it, and he’s the expert in the family!
for the top half of the room, we worth keeping looked at 100 different shades of blue. i love the way this turned out, but it definitely did not look like the color swatch we chose! i looked everywhere for a black and white patterned curtain (like fancy chandeliers or fleur-de-lis), and finally settled on a direct white curtain.
and our octopus chandelier? that got upgraded too. i’ll take this one any day!
you know that question that people ask, “if your house was on fire, what’s the one thing you would grab?” mine would be this window frame. i know that is illogical. i mean, this thing weighs like 25 pounds! but this frame means a lot to me. i took several of these old window frames from an old building on campus that was being renovated. a few of them survived all of my college moves, and some even held dried flowers or wrapping paper at christmas. but i always knew that one day i would put black & white wedding pics into this window. this is my go-to part of the room, maybe even the whole house!
the finished project!
kyle and i celebrating our one year anniversary in our go-to room!
isn’t he sweet? he remembered our wedding topper and added headless bride and groom keychains!
and they lived happily ever after!
What a nice dining room remodel!
What do you think of the new moldings?
I love molding!
