Home Projects

Working on the Dining Room

Okay, so the woodwork in our farmhouse is BEAUTIFUL. But the previous owners (or someone!) destroyed it. And then, put some sort of polyurethane on top of all the nicks and dings!! And that has made it impossible to stain and fix without a HUMONGOUS stripping job and days and days and hours and hours of stripping, sanding, refinishing, etc. And that's not easy when you have panels and grooves. Oh, the woodwork is so pretty!! But anyway, the damaged wood has been distracting and doesn't seem "clean looking" so we've decided to fix that! Oh, and the purple door thing.

So, looking at it in this picture, it looks really beautiful, right? There are our built-in cupboards and functioning dumbwaiter. Gorgeous. Keep reading for a closer look at the dinged up wood . . .

There's one stairway up (and you can see into the clinic).

That's the other stairway up. Yes, 2 stairways--one of my very favorite features of our beautiful house!

Here are the kids totally helping us unload all those bookshelves!

The extra stairway makes a handy place to put books while we paint! Yep, classics and church books and kids' books and . . . well everything in between, I guess. We love books!

So, don't freak out. We painted the wood (believe me, we tried EVERYTHING else we possibly could except for that whole huge project thing--stains, markers, sharpies, wax crayons, pencils, rubs, cloths, you name it). I resisted this, believe me. But we decided that it was better than the messed up look (close-ups in a bit).

We are THRILLED with the results--it has a beautiful antique finish that works great in a farmhouse! We love it! We didn't want it to look like painted wood and it doesn't!! This looks SO good!! We've purposely used a very, VERY dark brown that requires a primer. We purposely haven't used a primer so that the wood underneath comes through a bit. And we've done the whole thing in brushwork (really nice)! So, it looks fantastic! We've had people come over and suddenly notice things they hadn't noticed before (like the cupboards and dumbwaiter)!

Here's a close up of the messed up, damaged wood--what a shame:

It's really coming together nicely! OMIGOSH we LOVE LOVE LOVE having an old farmhouse--so much character and charm!! We love it!! We're so very grateful.

We haven't been so keen on the purple doors anyway . . .

And we've ordered a great antique black farmhouse hutch/buffet (for an AMAZINGLY low price) to put on that wall and we have a new light fixture to put in (we've had it for a while--great deal on eBay) and we're working on sanding and painting and fixing up the awesome dining room table we got at a thrift store (we're also using the antique black and dark, dark brown on that as well)--we are SO SO SO excited to have people to dinner! We can seat so many! We're so thrilled!! And a friend at church made us a "This Olde Farmhouse" sign (also on antique black) or that shelf on the wall and we got cool wrought iron curtain rods and really great curtains (with a touch of farmhouse red plaid in them). Oh, and that quote from the previous post? We're putting that up in an old-fashioned farmhouse-looking frame and stitch work. Omigosh, it's looking so very nice!!

So, I know it's not up close enough to really see it, but it has this GREAT antiqued look to it--we're so thrilled with it!!





Working on the Den

So, we got so excited about how great it looks that we've been doing the wood in the Den as well!

Before (seriously, WHAT in the world did they do in here?!):

Here we are in the middle of working on the den (through the pocket doors between the den and the living room):

And look how nice it looks!! We use this as our audio-visual room (books on tape, books on CD, computer work, etc.) as well as a library for simply reading and writing and other projects.

Here's where I sit (in the corner) and the kids' computer is to the right of the bookcase.