Delightful Dining Room

Dream dining room is making some serious progress these days.  I feel like since we finished painting it way back here we’ve just been steamrolling the projects out.  We took it one step further this weekend and added a rug…booyah!  So remember the rug from Overstock that I introduced you to back here in our inspiration post?  Well…I’ve been stalking that rug like a dirty person and it finally went on sale last week!  What great timing my pretty!  For Columbus Day week/weekend Overstock had ridiculous sales and everything was shipping for $1.  I ended up saving an extra $15 or so dollars when I ordered placed my order:

The rug was perfect for our dining room space and just what I was looking for.  It was even the perfect size!  We needed a pretty small rug so this 6′ baby for $84.57 (originally $99) was amazingly awesome!  The rug arrived on Thursday, just as the tracking info expected it to, and of course I rolled it out immediately.

Goose even liked it.  Well…that was once he stopped attacking/growling at it like it was an intruder to his domain.

It fit in the space so perfectly and barely covered up any of the freshly finished stencils on the floor.  Now you know the reason why I didn’t completely stencil the entire floor!  Let’s bring it up a notch and check out the rug in front of the window:

B-E-utiful!  Of course I couldn’t just leave the dining room empty!  So we brought in the table and chairs that I found at an antique store (for $200 and it includes 2 leafs and eight…count ’em…eight chairs!) that you can read about back here.

Be still my beating heart!  And one more shot for good measure:

It’s starting to feel like a real, full-blooded, legitimately usable dining room.  And not just that but a cute one too!  One of the genius things we did while planning our dining room, way back when we were prepping/moving the box for the ceiling light fixture, which is still TBD, is push it back some.  It’s no longer directly in the center of the room.  It’s slightly closer to the window than the parlor.  This allowed us to slide the table closer to the window, to make room to walk around the table since the dining room is a thoroughfare between the kitchen and the stairs, and still keep the light fixture centered over the table.

The above picture shows you the path from the hall down to the kitchen and the below picture shows the path from the kitchen to the hallway.

There is still plenty of room to navigate through the room and even enough room to expand the table and add four more chairs should we need the room for dinner guests.  AND…I finally got to set up the awesome wine rack that Colby made for me way back here:

It looks amazing!  Sadly, there are only four bottles of actual wine and the rest are empties that I’ve been saving to re-purpose as wedding decorations.

I think I need to stock it.  Or maybe I’ll wait and stock it as my reward for after I finish staining/polying it.  So let’s revisit the little dining room to-do list (mostly because I have the compulsive need to check one item off):

• Find a round rug
• Set up the dining room furniture/rug appropriately
• Spray paint and reinstall the heating registers
• Do something with the old closet (I’ve got a super secret project in mind)
• Make some curtains (I’m thinking yellow and stripe-ie since we need to start adding some color)
• Oh yeah…paint the trim
• While I’m at it…paint the cellar door
• Refinish the wine racks and put them in place
• Add some hardware to the window (yeah…it’s still missing hardware…slackers)
• Make a giant chalkboard
• Refinish the dining room table
• Remove the caning on the chairs and figure out how to upholster them

And true to form…I added a few things:

• Install a light fixture
• Switch out the outlets to white instead of tan
• Add outlet covers and a switch plate cover

Seriously?!  How did I leave off “install a light fixture” from the original list?!  I’m losing it.  So next up on the dining room makeover, I’m going to refinish the heating registers.  I really need to finish those before we lose a small child…Goose…down one of them.

Pssst…how was everyone’s weekends?  Any new projects tackled?  How’s that Halloween decorating coming?!  I worked on mine this weekend…Halloween blog post coming soon!