New dining room

The new floors that we are now enjoying has sparked a variety of improvement projects around the house that we are most proud of. When better to clean out and clean up than when you have to empty the majority of your house? While we are gradually getting finishing touches put back up on the walls and shelves, we are extremely happy with our new dining room. We felt like our old dining room set was not as kid friendly as we need, and it kind of filled up our little dining room space. The table has not been set up for over a year, and the chairs have been living in the basement to allow for more play space in that area. We don't have a play room or a den, so we do all of our living in the living room, and that includes play. While we have been without a dining room table, we've been doing all of our eating around our little bitty kitchen table. And that is fine and good for breakfast and small lunches, but dinner time would be so much better at a proper table. Especially in the event that we want to have guests.

So, we placed our old dining room table, chairs, and buffet/hutch in a local consignment store, and we have replaced them with the following items:

a pedestal table and two cross back chairs from Ikea
two long benches that I found at the Mission Thrift and Joe sanded and painted
a series of shelves in the place of the hutch.

Having that hutch out of there has really freed up a lot of space, and the pedestal table paired with the benches cuts down on too many table and chair legs that tend to fill up a space. We also removed the old, out of date light fixture that has been in there for so long, and we replaced it with a lower profile, modern fixture (also from Ikea). The old green rug was removed and replaced with some randomly placed, small round rugs. Why would we cover up those gorgeous floors? I still want to make cushions for the chairs and benches, but for now, we could not be happier with our new room.

Now, for before and after pictures.....I don't have any good befores. We have been clearing the rooms all summer, so it has been in a series of disrepair for quite some time, so I never got a really great, bona fide before shot. The best I can find are from old parties, so please enjoy the shots below from last year's Christmas party. Let's hope my friends in the pictures don't kill me for putting these images on the inter-webs. (but it's a great test to see who is and is not reading my beloved blog!!)



I know it's hard to see, but both pics show the dining room set and the light fixture. Ok....you've probably skipped all this explanation just to see the goods. So here ya go:



So, whaddya think? Good? Wanna come eat supper sometime?