dining room renovation

As we are working on the house, we like to take some time every now and then to stop and appreciate what we've done so far.  Here's a super long post about how far our dining room has come since we bought the house.  It was the first room we finished (mostly) and it was certainly a room that gave us a great deal of learning experience.  We had never done any kind of home renovation before and we soon learned that it takes a lot longer and a lot more effort than we thought!  It's interesting now to look back and see the evolution of our process.

Lets start with a photo of what the dining room looked like when we first walked in. Lots and lots of wallpaper and a broken light that liked to hang down at waist level.

And now comes the fun process...  We started with some DIF (that fun gel stuff that supposedly strips wallpaper).  Didn't work so well for us but not for lack of trying!

This is how far I got after 3 hours of scraping:

And now lets take a quick look at our hip wallpaper stripping style.  This is how we spent many weeks in every room throughout the house:

Unfortunately I don't have pictures of the wallpaper evolution, but we soon switched to a steamer which made a lot of difference.  We were able to get multiple layers of wallpaper stripped much more quickly.  However it was still a very messy process.  Then, we had a colleague of Jared's come to help with her husband who is a painter and he brought these fun razor blades with long handles that stripped wallpaper in NO TIME.  He finished an entire room in the amount of time it took me to do that dreadful first patch.  So, with those new razor blades put to work, this is what our dining room soon looked like:

Not great, but better than that wallpaper! And when the wallpaper came down we found this lovely patch on our wall which we assume must have formerly been the front door.  We don't quite know why someone would move it but that part of the wall is a new addition.

Throughout all this work we were also having the entire house re-wired for electricity and new light fixtures put in.  It was a super day when we came home from work to find this up!

To try and fix that silly wall section, we tried covering it with lots of joint compound.  It certainly made it more paintable but was a tedious process.

Next, we got to start the fun process of picking out paint samples and taping up the room to start painting.  We realized that some water stains were coming through the joint compound so got some Kilz primer to take care of the situation.

Since the house obviously hadn't been updated in a while, the old caulking was cracked and falling out.  We got rid of that so we could re-caulk the seams between the walls and the trim.  Jared has become a caulking champion!

Once that was done and everything was taped up we were ready to start painting!  Jared and I primed with the Kilz and then my sister and her fiance came over to lend us a hand.

The room was finally starting to look so good!  We painted the trim an eggshell color and that really brought things together.

The last thing that I needed to do before moving furniture in was to wash and re-varnish the floors.  What a difference that made!

After that we moved the furniture in (include the bar we bought after our wedding that we love!) and the hutch from IKEA that we bought when we were still apartment living.

And that, folks, is how we redid our dining room!  From gloomy wallpaper to bright, sunny paint we learned a lot along the way and LOVE the results.  We still have to hang art and find the best decorations, but we are so happy with it.

Until, of course we had our insulation done a few weeks ago and now it looks like this:

But we did it one time, we can do it again!  Bring on the paint!!