We finally finished our dining room. Freshly painted, it looks as good as we imagined.
Before repainting, it still left a lot to our imagination.
The room did seem much more spacious with a new 8’ wide opening at the end (and a new hallway and windows beyond). And we did appreciate the way this new opening frames the view of the windows that frame views to the garden. But the room had not yet realized its full potential.
It was a new paint job that really made all the features we added to the room stand out.
Like this feature — the new doorway to the kitchen…
designed not only for better flow, but also to provide a distant view “across the kitchen, and through the opening on the stair (also new), and out the window, and across the side yard, and up the hill.”
As you may recall from an earlier posting (Building Inspector posted April 28, 2012) there was no doorway in this corner before The Destruction.
We’ve been waiting a long time for this room to live up to our expectations. The Destruction left it in a bit of a shambles. The walls needed a good patching and painting, and one wall also needed a section of plate rail.
It took a concerted effort to get the room looking its best.
We asked a friend in the neighborhood to make custom wood trims to match the 100 year old plate rail. He did a great job…
adding the missing piece to complete the room.
And John did a great job preparing old walls…
and applying new paint.
What did I do? Well, I picked the perfect Benjamin Moore paint colors for our room: ‘Overcast’ above and ‘Cheyenne Green’ below.
I also arranged plates and cups and saucers around the room. The pattern and color of our “fine china” (purchased this summer for $3.00 at Listen Thrift Store in New Hampshire) puts a modern twist on the traditional plate rail.
And, when John finished all the painting late one night (actually early one morning around 1:30 AM), I mixed Manhattans.
It was the least I could do to mark the re-opening of our dining room (and say “thank you” to John for doing all the hard labor).
Only Jack did less work than I did. He did not lift a paw or a paint brush, and found our fascination with the project to be quite tiresome.
I guess from his point of view, the dining room looks pretty much the same regardless of the paint job.
live. enjoy. repeat.