The dining room is painted (dun, dun, dun, duuuuun)! It took forever because I pulled a muscle in my back and neck that left me doing next to nothing for the last week. How did I pull it, you ask? Yoga. That’s right. F%$^ing yoga. Not even the strenuous hot yoga where you burn a calorie or two, but yoga for beginners. I’m ashamed to say that yoga left me in pain for days…
I’m better and back into the swing of full on house projects and now that the dining room is painted, it’s one of my favorite projects because I ventured out of my comfort zone, first with the crazy rug, and now with the bold wall color.
This is what the room looked like before painting (and art):
And here’s what it looks like now:
It’s coming along. For the paint color, I really liked two teal-ish paints; one was dark and more green and the other was lighter and bluer. Because I couldn’t decide between the two, I just had Home Depot mix them 50/50. My inspiration color was this and I think I got pretty close:
The art is from Artfully Walls which sells fairly inexpensive art in collections so you don’t have to rack your brain deciding if this painting goes with this print or if the colors clash; the “experts” put them together for you so it’s pretty fool-proof. I did pick out the frames though, so I didn’t totally cheat.
Another good thing about Artfully Walls is that they have the collection hung up on a sample wall in the arrangement that they think looks best. After I received and framed the art, I went online to see the arrangement they recommended, but my collection was not for sale anymore so I had to rely on my wits, talent, and perseverance to come up with an arrangement myself. To do this I laid the artwork out on the ground and just played around with the position and spacing.
I went with the bottom arrangement since I like symmetry even if this is a loose definition of symmetry:
I like the way the art looks (especially against the teal wall), but they are reproductions of the real deal and I’d rather have the actual real deal, so my goal is buy one nice piece of artwork every year or two to have an actual art collection that I love and that I can pass on to the kids when they’re older and I’m close to kicking the bucket. I love art and when things slow down (like when the kids go to college in about 9 years), I’d love to try my hand at painting. For now, I buy what I like from real artists.
I still have a way to go in this room to include finding curtains, replacing the buffet which is actually a fish stand that we got at PetSmart years ago, replacing the chandelier with something more modern, and putting up something on the wall opposite the new art wall. I also want to try some wainscoting because I can’t stand the ivory, beat up, old lady wallpaper that I have now, but I have to wrap up other projects first so for now, I’ll keep painting the deck…little by little that will get done! We also have some guests coming to stay with us in August so our guest room needs some attention which I’ve already started thinking about. More on that soon!
