Dining Room Before & After (Old House)

I've been in the new house for about 10 months now, it's finally starting to feel like 'home'.  I firmly say that I love the new house and neighborhood and though there are things I miss about the old house, on the whole I don't miss being there like I did at the beginning.  So those are all great things!

Before I begin blogging too much about the new house I want to wrap up the old house with a few rooms that I never got around to featuring.  It's funny to me how hindsight is always 20/20.  There were always spaces in the old place that never felt done or felt like I needed to redo or tweak them more.  I'm not going to bash our old style too bad because we used our spaces well and thoroughly enjoyed the life we had in them - which if you ask me is the true measure of a home, no matter how 'styled' and well put together they really are.

I feel so silly writing this post!  Clearly it isn't stopping me too much since I'm going through with it. I just feel like I need to 'preserve' it here on the blog for prosperity.  So here we go, let's start with a pretty world class 'before':

Dining room with two tone floral wallpaper and coordinating border

With our first house we inherited rooms full of floral wallpaper.  Sadly this wasn't the worst wallpaper in the whole house, and honestly it wasn't the first room that we planned to pull down (that would have been this one), but on moving day a dear friend of ours saw a seam of loose paper on this wall and riiiiiiiped it down!  And thus, makeover #1 was on the books!

I never hated this room, but it never felt quite right to me either.  Looking back now I see all the reasons why.  We chose and bought the paint in the store, we chose the wrong finish, we decided to stain all of the outlet/light switch covers (still not sure why we did that), the curtain rod and curtains were bought on clearance and were okay...but not a wow.  The table was purchased in the excitement of new house buying before we moved in and so was a little big for the room and we never found chairs that we loved to go with them so we always used these mismatched ones from our wedding (11 years in and they are still in use).  The light we bought from a big box store (our first foray into changing out light fixtures) and in retrospect is not something I'd choose again.  But we got the wallpaper down (WALLPAPER!!!! GRRR) and paint up and spent a fair amount of time updating the space and in the 9 years we lived there it was good enough.

In staging the house for listing we took out the small buffet and replaced our dining table with an oval table.  I'm not sure how but the room felt smaller.  Our house sold fast but we lived with the staged version for about 2 months before moving and after living with less furniture in there it is kind of funny to think that we had all of that in such a small room!  Here is the listing picture to give another look at the space as well as a few more pictures of it without the small buffet and with the round table.

So that's the reveal of a room that we no longer live with and that I was ready to redo :)  In total I lived with the space in a variety of forms (but always with the flat Havana cream-yellow) for 9 years.  I was ready to redo it by then, how long does it take you to feel like your rooms need a refresh?