Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Dining Room Saga

Last night, I hosted Bunco at my house, so we took some pictures of our Christmas decorations while the house was all clean :) But before I post my Christmas decoration pictures, I realized there are a few rooms I need to post pictures of without Christmas decorations up. So, let me tell you about my dining room. Bear with me; this has been the most crazy room to get together. I want to document all the changes we went through to get it where it is now, though, because I think it's hilarious. Ha!

First off, I have to say that usually when I decorate a room, I have a vision of how I want it to turn out in my head. Even if I don't have an exact picture in my mind, I have a definite idea of where I'm going with a design. I almost ALWAYS pick one paint color, put it on the walls, and love it. That was not the case in this room. I did have a picture in my head of how I wanted the room to turn out - you may remember I blogged about my ideas HERE - but the room really looks nothing like that now. Haha. I'm happy with the way it turned out in the end, so it's all good!

We started by painting the walls. We picked a color that we thought would look good with the rug we had already bought (in the pictures in that old blog post). The warm paprika color I was going for ended up looking like this (you may want to put your sunglasses on before you look at this picture): Ummm, not exactly what I was going for. I don't know if you can tell in these pictures, but the color was seriously burnt orange. Really the best word I can think of to describe it is "loud." Or "obnoxious." Not the look I wanted for my formal dining room. Honestly, I thought it was a cute color for a playroom or maybe even a half bath. Just not for my dining room. (If you have this color in your formal dining room and love it, I'm sorry. I'm sure it looks fabulous, but it just didn't "go" in my house. Ha!) I lived with the color for several days hoping it would grow on me, but it just wasn't right. We knew we were going to have to pick another color, but we went ahead and painted the whole room the orange color since we had the paint. We figured it would serve as a good primer for the new color we would get. We kind of got into a race against time. We had found a dining room table that we LOVED and ordered it. It was out of stock when we bought it, and we had to wait a month or so for it to come in. That worked out well since we hadn't started painting at that point. We wanted to have the room painted before we got furniture in there. When the whole paint fiasco happened, though, it started to look like we might not get it all painted [TWICE] before our table was delivered. We rushed to pick a new color (again using our rug to pull the color from) and get it on the walls before our table came. You can really tell how orange the first color was when you compare it to the new color, which has a lot more brown in it. We didn't end up completely finishing the room before we got our table. We got the first coat done, but we ended up needing two coats, even with the orange primer. Ha! It's ironic that this room literally sat empty for almost a year, and then we were up late busting our booties trying to get it painted the night before our furniture came. Typical ;) We got our table and chairs, and we LOVE them! They were (are) just what we were hoping for!
The table came with six chairs, but we really wanted eight. The table was large enough for eight chairs, so we had decided that we would get get two parsons chairs to go at the heads of the table. I love the look of more "fancy" chairs for the heads, anyway. So I went to a fabric store that has parsons chairs and where you can pick any of their fabric to cover the chair. I got a few fabric samples, but I really fell in love with some chairs they had in stock that were already covered. I knew in the back of my mind that they weren't going to look good with the rug that we already had (and had picked a paint color to match. TWICE.) but I took one of the chairs home on approval on the off chance that it might work since I liked it so much. As soon as I got it home, I knew it looked awful with the rug. I really loved the chair though! (This picture is dark, so it's hard to tell how much it clashed with the rug... but believe me, it did!)I honestly was more in love with the chair than I was with the rug. By this point, Thanksgiving was quickly approaching. Remember we were hosting Thanksgiving. It really wasn't essential to have the dining room completely finished for Thanksgiving, but that was kind of the goal we had set for ourselves when we first moved into our house a year ago (almost) and volunteered to host Thanksgiving. So it really bugged me to to think about ordering chairs to go with our rug and almost definitely not having them by Thanksgiving. David and I talked about it and decided to keep the chairs and return the rug. The only problem was that we had had the rug longer than the time allotted for returns. AND we had picked the paint color to go with the rug. We really weren't thrilled about the idea of possibly having to paint the room for a third time.

David called the store where we had gotten the rug, and they said we could still return it. I went and looked at the same store and found another rug that I liked that I thought just might go with the chairs AND the wall color! So, we exchanged the rug and, amazingly, the new one worked! It actually looked even better in the room than the original one. It's a lighter rug, and since the walls ended up so dark, it was nice to have some lighter colors added in. So we ended up being able to keep the chairs and not paint the walls! And the room was presentable by Thanksgiving! We were so happy with the way it all worked out.

There was a drama with the buffet lamps too. When the whole scheme of the room changed, I had to scratch the idea for blue gourd lamps for the buffet. I looked all over and couldn't really find any lamps that were jumping out at me. I found two that I liked and brought them home to try, but I thought they were too tall. Plus, when I got them home, I realized one of them was broken. So I found two more lamps that I likd and tried them out. They were too small. We even tried our bedside lamps in the dining room. We finally ended up going with the ones I brought home first - we exchanged the broken one for a good one and lowered the harps so they were a better height.

After that novel I just wrote, I feel like the reveal is going to be kind of anti-climactic. Partly because I don't have many pictures of the dining room the way it looks now. I would just take some more, but our Christmas decorations are up! I'll post those soon. But here is the dining room the way it looked for Thanksgiving: I love the way it turned out, but it isn't completely finished. We are going to hang something (art? pictures of the kids?) on that big blank wall to the right, and we're going to get curtains at some point. I also have to come up with a permanent centerpiece for the table, but all the "big" stuff is done! I'm so glad to have this room semi-done since it's one of the first rooms you see when you come in our front door. It's also so nice to have seating for more than four people :) And now you all know WAY more than you ever cared to know about our dining room! Haha.

4 comments:

Nathalie said...

Looks great! The second paint colour is definitely better than the first!!

Christi said...

Love it. Loved the story too. Beautiful.

Christi

Jennifer said...

Very pretty!I LOVE your floors and the rug looks fabulous!

Sarah Denley said...

So pretty! I love it!