We moved to this house in 2006, two weeks before Christmas.
It was a really ugly Christmas.
You can’t say we didn’t try.
Christmas dinner.
Cheese, crackers, & cookies.
Dixie was all tuckered out.
Merry Christmas y’all!
Ghost of Christmas Past Friday, Dec 19 2008
Dining Room and Misc Christmas 12:20 am
We Can’t Find Our Christmas Decorations… Friday, Dec 19 2008
Dining Room and Misc 12:13 am
We don’t have an attic so we keep our Christmas decorations in the basement.
Yes, that basement.
The last few months, Dad & Owen have been doing all kinds renovating and insulating down in the basement.
Unfortunately, in all the moving around of boxes and furniture, our boxes of Christmas decorations have been misplaced. We know they’re down there somewhere under a mountain of boxes.
This year is our first without all of our traditional family ornaments.
So, instead we went “green” with our decorating (at least in a Gladu kind of way).
Here is our “Christmas Shrub”:
This year instead of buying a regular Christmas tree, we bought a small evergreen shrub.
We put it in a cute coppery planter that we had left over from our summertime gardening.
Ariel hung some really pretty sheer coppertone ribbon around it and some little golden colored “berries”.
We went to our local craft store at the mall (yes, we do have a “mall” here), and since they had a 60 % off Christmas item sale we stocked up on some cute stuff.
We figured that we can say we went “green” for Christmas since we can plant the “tree” after the holidays.
Last week, while out Christmas shopping in Greensboro, we popped into Linen’s n Things to take advantage of their going out of business sale.
We found this beautiful round golden tablecloth for the dining room.
We went retro and bought some glittery fake fruit for the centerpiece bowl.
We used Mom’s HUGE vintage crystal vase to make a dramatic arrangement.
We used both boxwood (we call them bowling ball shrubs…actually we don’t know why we call them that…) and some variety of holly berries to create the arrangement.
The thorns on the holly bush are like 2 inch long daggers, which made for dangerous decorating.
Some pretty poinsettias by the fireplace in the living room.
When we bought the “Christmas tree” at Lowe’s, they had cute little bundles of evergreen trimmings for sale.
So, we used them and some cute little silvery berries to make this arrangement in Grandma’s old green glass basket vase.
The other day while we were cleaning we found this old picture from Grandma & Grandpa’s house in Arkansas.
Mom and our cousin made this “snow farmer” on Grandpa’s vintage tractor.
Dining Room After Pictures Thursday, Oct 23 2008
Dining Room Dining Room 4:58 pm
Remember this?
Here are a bunch of pictures of our finished dining room:
This is/was Grandma’s dining room table which she bought years ago.
The table is stamped 1910 and it has 3 leaves which make it expand enough to seat lots of guests.
Since Dad works for Stanley Furniture Co, we figured we had to own some Stanley pieces.
We got this pretty buffet for the dining room.
This is Grandma’s china cabinet that she inherited from our Great Great Great Grandfather’s family (that’s a lot of greats!).
It matches the chairs and used to have a table and buffet; both of which were beyond salvageable.
One of our Great Great Great Grandpa’s chairs.
Dining Room Before Tuesday, Oct 21 2008
Dining Room Dining Room 9:14 pm
One of the few completed rooms in our house is the dining room.
Of all the rooms in the house, this one demanded serious attention!
Here are two pictures from the real estate listing:
Hiding behind all of that pink and blue wallpaper:
Altogether there were four layers of wallpaper dating back to 1940.
Now…underneath the nasty brown carpet was:
There is NO way to describe the smell!
When we took up the carpet (hoping desperately to find hardwood floors) there was years and years of crystallized pet pee powder (you can thank Ariel for that vivid description – she’s spot on though – yes… pun intended).
We were so glad to find hardwood floors throughout the house (under VERY old carpet) and that it was all salvageable. The dining room floors were so bad we had to bleach them before having them refinished.
This was one of the most ickiest rooms to scrub down!
Most people would be embarrassed to post a picture like this…but you’ve already seen Dad in his Oompa Loompa suit so…
At this point of the renovation we began to wonder if the dining room would ever be finished!
Here’s Mom trying to scrape off layers of wallpaper.
Originally we wanted to be able to take off all the old wallpaper and paint the walls.
You wouldn’t believe how many hours it took to scrape off all the paper.
Everyone in the family spent hours and hours over several months working to remove the paper.
We tried so many different wallpaper remover sprays and gels (spending gobs and heaps of money) with only so-so results. Somewhere we read that using fabric softener helps with removing wallpaper.
We were very skeptical but since we tried everything else (short of using a steam thingie), we figured why not try it?
We tried and it worked very well and for very little money.
We wish we had found out about this method sooner, since we bought a house covered in wallpaper.
Unfortunately, even with the paper gone the walls weren’t smooth enough to paint.
Even though we were so tired of looking at wallpaper…alas, we had no choice but to paper.
After looking online at a zillion samples we actually ended up with a very pretty paper from Lowes (and a very good price compared to online stores).
When we took off the wallpaper on the wall with the window, we found a very bad patch job done to repair water damage. It had this chicken wire and coil looking thingies poking off the wall (if that makes any sense!). This was a very big job for Dad. In the end, the wall came out looking great!
One of the first major things we had done in the dining room was to have the floors refinished.
Daddy decided to put up wainscoting panel stuff on the lower half of the wall.
In the next post, we will show you all of the “after” shots.
