You might have noticed that we’ve made more than one change to our dining room in the past few weeks. Our DIY photo ledges were really the catalyst for several updates, starting with the wall color!
I think this is one of the most recent shots of our dining room before we painted. That frame collage and the bright brown walls (can brown be bright?) had been bugging me for awhile, so one weekend, I took down all the art and started patching nail holes.
I couldn’t believe how many holes we had in this wall alone.
Before we started priming the walls, I took a full afternoon to caulk, patch, and repaint our baseboards. I’ve been slooooowly working my way through the house, finishing out the baseboards from our wood floor installation almost a year ago. It’s a long process!
Finally it was time to prime. Getting rid of those brown walls was such a relief.
Now here’s where the story gets a little dicey. We’d had the dining room wall color mixed at Lowe’s from one of their old Valspar paint chips. That night when I opened the can to get ready to paint, the color looked lighter than I expected it to be and I noticed a pool of dark tint all around the rim of the paint can. But it was late, and I wanted to be done, so I went against my better judgement and painted the room that night.
When I woke up the next morning, I was sure the color was wrong. The paint chip I had was a warm taupey-gray, and the color on my walls was barely-there gray. The photo below doesn’t even give a true sense of how light this paint was.
I hung up the curtains and tried living with the wrong color (because I REALLY didn’t want to repaint), but I’m sure you can guess how long that lasted. Until the very next weekend when I marched up to Lowe’s with my mostly-empty can of bad paint.
Surprisingly, I received a full refund which I used to pick up a can of the right color (Valspar’s Gray Silt) and get back to work. See the difference?
This picture is probably the best depiction of how truly blue-gray the original color was compared to the warm taupey-gray I was after.
Finally, two weekends after we started what was supposed to be a quick color change, we got it right.
Then it was time to put the room back together. After hanging the curtains, I used my hillbilly hemming trick, which is basically to pin the curtains where they hit the floor, bust out the ironing board, and heat’n’bond that hem without even taking the curtains down to do it.
It may be unconventional, but it works!
After the curtain hemming came lots and lots of photo framing. Most of our prints came from Walmart (I ordered them online one night and picked them up the next morning), and the frames are from a variety of sources.
To keep framing costs down, I shopped around for a couple weeks to find simple black and white frames (the bigger, the better). I’d say my most surprising sources were Big Lots and Deals (similar to a dollar store) – I scored two 14×18″ frames for $5 each from Deals and two 11×14″ frames for $3 each from Big Lots.
Another tip for finding big frames: Don’t overlook frames with collage-style mats. My four large black frames all came with collage mats, but since I was framing standard-sized photos, I just tossed the collage mats and picked up pre-cut plain white mats from Hobby Lobby.
So that’s what went on behind the scenes before we shared our new photo ledges. I’d still like to find a rug for under our table, but that’s not high on the priority list yet.
What do you think of the new paint color? Do simple finishing projects like caulking baseboards or hemming curtains take as long at your place as they seem to around here? Tell me I’m not the only one!
