Monday, March 7, 2011

Redecorating Phase 1: Our Dining Room

Within the past year or so, Matt and I have been steadily outgrowing our house.  This was the perfect starter home for us, but now that our family is more than 2 people, it's just no surprise that we're running out of space.  We've had our house on the market twice before (last summer and then the winter of 2008) with no luck.  We're not surprised about that either because 1- the market sucks for selling a house and 2 - there's a brand new neighborhood right down the road from us where people can buy a brand new house for the same price as ours.  Ours isn't old (not even 4 years), but it's no comparison to a brand new house.

We've come to the realization that we're probably going to be in this house for a few more years.  While it's not exactly my first choice, we've decided that we may as well do as much as we can to make this house "work" while we're here.  This means doing as much as we can to create more storage/more room, and to also just "spruce" up how it looks.  Most of our furniture is stuff that we had when we first got married (ie: not the greatest stuff or nicest looking stuff) so we're trying to be creative in how we can buy some new stuff and keep some stuff to make the best looking/best functioning house that we can. 

Step one in this phase?  Our dining room.  Our dining room in the first house that we lived in when we got married was HUGE compared to the one we have now.  It was plenty big, but with just two of us, we rarely used it.  So when we shopped for a new home, that wasn't high on our priority list because it seemed like wasted space to us. 

Then we had a child. 

Now that LL is here, we never eat anywhere else but at the table as a family.  That is an important value to us (we both ate as a family growing up) and something that we for sure are going to do with our family.  No tv, no radio, no electronics - just our family at the dinner table.  I LOVE this and it's often one of my favorite parts of the day because we can be together with absolutely no distractions.  If you call our house during dinner, 9.9 times out of 10 we won't even answer.  And if we do, it's to tell you that we'll call you back when we're done.

With such a small dining room (and a highchair taking up one of the chairs) it has been SUCH a tight squeeze whenever we try to have company over.  Lord help us when we have two kids to try and squeeze in there!  For our Christmas present from my dad, we asked him to build us some bench seating with storage underneath.  This way, we would get more sitting room AND storage room.  A win win. 

Our table is still rather small and we plan to get a new one.  Now that we have the benches, we can handle a little bit of a bigger table in there without overwhelming the space.  Until then, our current table is working well.  Better than before, even.  So here you go - our new dining room!

The before:

The after:






I bought this picture for Matt when he got ordained as a minister.  It hung in his office at church for a long time, but now it's in our dining room.  It has Psalms 1:3 on it - "He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.  Whatever he does prospers."


So whaddya think?  I think it's an amazing improvement!  A HUGE thanks to my dad for building the benches and to Mrs. Becky (Matt's mom) for spending countless hours making our cushions and new curtains!

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1 comment:

Emily said...

don't you hate how hard it is to do a room justice in pictures? you can tell it looks great but it looks even better in person for SURE!