Show Us Your Dining Rooms!

Hey hey! Hope you had a lovely weekend! These third Monday’s sneak up on me – I can’t believe it’s time for another show off partay!

This month we’re sharing dining spaces – any size, any type, you are good! If you’ve been around for awhile, you know I’m making some BIG changes to our dining room, but more on that in a bit.

First, let’s take a little walk down memory lane shall we? This first photo is preblog and it shows off the start of my red and gold phase:

The gold rectangle on the ceiling was…well. Interesting.

I changed up the drapes a couple times, and blogged about this version here:

I also covered the basic seats with a red fabric – told you I loved that gold and red!

Then a few years ago, the room got a redo – I painted the walls (and ceiling!) and recovered the chairs:

And later I ditched the top part of the hutch (it came right off!) and found this beautiful buffet underneath:

And last year I sold the (uncomfortable) chairs and found a Goodwill set:

You can see by the one spray painted chair that I only got so far with it. The room sat with one white chair for nearly a year.

But when we got our new floors last fall, you can see that the room got REALLY dark. Overwhelmingly dark. I loved the dark and dramatic walls and ceiling when we had light carpet (although I always hated carpet in the dining room), but every surface of the room a dark brown was too much.

I started considering new paint colors but then a new idea hit…the one I told you about here where I was thinking hard about not using this as a dining room at all anymore, but instead as a library of sorts.

One with comfy chairs, a wall of bookcases and it would be a room we would actually USE. (In eight years I am pretty sure we’ve only used the dining room three times? Maybe four? Nope, I think three.)

Well, I decided to go for it, and I showed you the latest on the redo a couple weeks ago here (it’s slow going):

This weekend I did the first coat on the ceiling, got the baseboards, and last week the drywall guys did touch ups in here when they worked on the basement.

It’s coming along! The painted ceiling has made SUCH a big difference in there – wow! I hope to show you the updates this week. Now that the ceiling is brightened, I’m excited to keep moving forward and get some contrast going in this room again. :)

I am IN LOVE with how this space is changing! I can’t wait to see the built ins completed…hopefully in May they’ll be done.

Now let’s see YOUR spaces! It doesn’t have to be an actual dining room – any space where you sit and eat is fair game. ;)

If you’d like to be considered for a highlight, I’d love a link back in your post – this handy dandy code should make it easy:

<div align="center"><a href="http://thriftydecorchick.com/" title="Show Us Your House" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.homestoriesatoz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image34.png" alt="Thrifty Decor Chick" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the year!:

May (nursery/kids rooms), June (outdoor spaces), July (bathrooms), August (family rooms), September (basements/rec rooms), October (bedrooms, guest or master), November (foyers), December (mud/laundry rooms)

Now link it up! Happy Monday! :)