Little Red Dining Room

This is a story about a room.  The room that caused me to fall in love with our house 6 years ago. 

Once upon a time, there was a pregnant and hormonal girl that needed a bigger house to live in.  She searched and searched and finally found a house that felt like home.  The reason it felt like home...the beloved red dining room.  It was perfect in all its red glory.  The room had a dimmer on the can lights and the chandelier had candles on it.  She had dreams of romantic dinners in the dining room with her sweet and wonderful husband.  Then along came kid #1, then came kid #2, and finally kid #3 and still no romantic dinners under the candles.  Oh well...it was a fairy tale to begin with.

One of the very first projects we did in this house was in the dining room.  I loooved this room.  But it did need just a little something to break up all the redness.  We decided to add wainscoting to the bottom half of the walls with a chair rail above that. 

You can click on each picture to see a larger version.

This house is full of weird angles and it makes it difficult for full shots of the room.  This is standing in the hallway looking in the dining room.  In the above picture we had already taken down the oh so romantic light fixture from the previous owners and replaced it with the original fixture shoved in the attic.

This shot is from the center of the room looking out to the rest of the house.  Originally, the dining room had carpet in it, which I will never understand.  Who puts carpet in a place where food can be dropped on the floor?  Craziness!!

After living with the little red dining room for a while I soon realized that it was too dark compared to the rest of the house.  So I convinced Matt that we needed to paint the room and not just one color either.  Two colors.

I chose the color Tobacco Road for the top color and a shade of brown for the bottom color.  After I finished the Tobacco Road color on top I really wasn't happy with it but I wasn't going to dare tell Matt that I hated it and I wanted to repaint already.  So I lived with it but secretly it gave me the twitches every.single.time I looked at the room. 

This is a poor old cell phone picture that I took when I was trying to decide on the color for the bottom half of the room.  We also ripped out the carpet in here and installed laminate floors.   

Here you can see the final color of the room.  It was ok and an improvement from the dark red from before.  So I lived with this for about two years and then this year I decided I needed lighter.  I made an agreement with Matt that if I painted the room by myself with no help then he could take 1 climbing trip to Oklahoma.  If he helped me then he could take 2 climbing trips to Oklahoma.  I did it all myself. 

The color in the laundry room is Silver Sage from Restoration Hardware and the shade just lighter than that is called Light Silver Sage.  Go figure!  I love these two colors.  So that's what I chose.  When the late afternoon sun hits the dining room the color is perfect.  This is a shade that changes colors as the sun hits it throughout the day.  It's fresh and cozy, I think anyway.

So here are the after pictures.

It's a dramatic difference.  The "curtains" are from Target this last Christmas.  Target had a beautiful selection of table cloths and so I bought two and hung them up.  Using table cloths as curtains is a great inexpensive way of getting the look you want in a room.  So next time your in a store with table cloths check them out as a possibility for curtains. 

I have since added two benches in here for seating for the boys.  I love this room and it makes me happy every time I walk by it, which is about 1 million times a day. 

The light fixture we found at a garage sale for $10.  It was from a model home down the street so it was a sweet score. 

I'll be back soon with another room transformation. 

Have a great week!

Linking up to these awesome places:
Thrifty Décor Chick
Mom4Real
House of Hepworths
Fox Hollow Cottage