Dining Room Remodel...

When we bought this house in 2008, we bought a house with 5 rooms of wallpaper. None of which looked good or decent. I am proud to say that as of about a week ago, we are wallpaper free. The wallpaper is still technically there, but thanks to two coats of Kilz, texture and two coats of regular paint, you would never know that wallpaper still lives on our walls.

The last wallpaper beautification project was our dining room. I have to say, it was the most tolerable of all the wallpaper patterns. It was stripes. Navy, tan and white stripes. Not bad, but it still could make me dizzy and sick to my stomach if I looked at it too long. Something that was interesting to us was the painters that painted the house before it was put up for sale painted over the wallpaper on the bottom part of the wall below the chair rail. Now I must ask...why did they paint/texture this small area and leave the rest of the hideous wallpaper up for all to see? Who knows. In the pictures of the house online, it just looked like a reddish color paint on the bottom part, but when we removed the outlet plates to paint we discovered it was the same maroon sponge paint looking paper that was in the entry. My next question....why would you put a maroon sponge paint looking paper with navy, tan and white stripes? To tie into the entry? So strange...

We struggled with our paint choices because I really wanted a colorful dining room. I have always loved yellow and I thought this would be a great place for yellow. I got a huge NO from Kyle. He does not like yellow and he believes it stems from the 70's yellow kitchen his mom had before the remodel. We have been wanting to paint all the walls in our house something other than the blah white they are now, so we decided a gray would be nice and neutral. So we chose a gray. And then we chose a chocolate brown for the area below the chair rail. In case you are thinking gray and brown is not necessarily the best combination, we chose a gray that had some "hints" of brown in it...you will see in the pictures.

Here is the dining room before:

(the before photos were taken a few months after we moved in...we still do not have a Christmas tree up...I have strict rules regarding the timing of putting up and taking down a Christmas tree!)

And after:

(Thanks Lauren for the beautiful picture...we finally have a home for it!)

Now we only need to work on the floors, kitchen counters, kitchen cabinets, bathroom floors, touch ups, and so on and so on....

Until next time...Gig'em!