dining room before & after

Okay! After a "long and grueling" process comprised mostly of me finally just rebooting my iPhoto.....my before & after pics finally showed up! Here are some before shots:

Sans furniture:



Looking from dining room into our living room:

We were thinking that since we have our cute little chair rail that we might try doing a different color on top and on bottom - LOOK OUT - we're crazy! Who knows what we'll do next! We had been on such a roll with the den and the kitchen and wanted to get our paint on again while we were in the zone, so we picked our colors and I went to the store one glorious Saturday. I wanted the top color in the dining room to be the same color we will end up using in our bedroom - a light gray leaning more towards the blue end of the spectrum than the brown. Since this is a dining room where food will be eaten (and occasionally thrown), I was thinking that it might be a good idea to get a satin finish for that room rather than flat like we'd done in the other two rooms. This is what I call Mistake #2. Mistake #1 was my overconfidence in my new abundance of painting experience (one large wall) to the extent that I didn't think I needed to tape the floor boards or chair rail. I love those new edgers, but in my experience they do NOT eliminate the need for tape if you want to do the most clean paint job you can. NOTED!

I started with the bottom, darker section of the dining room first (dark gray), and I notice as I'm going along doing the edging that 1) Man it probably would have been a good idea to tape, and 2) this paint isn't drying as seamlessly and magnificently as the other rooms we did. Hmm....and it looks a little shinier than I imagined....Hmm. NOT COOL. I went ahead and finished the bottom section, Kevin came home and lovingly confirmed my suspicions. It was looking like crap. So before we proceed, Kevin patiently and manly-ly (shh) taped off all the top section and we decided to do the top using the flat gallon we'd purchased for our bedroom and just exchange the satin gallon for another flat version since we hadn't opened it.

NOTE: Sherwin Williams has great paint, and I'd been able to get all the paint we've used thus far at deep discounts, but they have really inconvenient hours and a horrible return policy - in that they won't do it if they've colored the paint. While I'm really glad to know that if I happen to buy 10 gallons of UNcolored paint I can return it no problem (???), it was irritating that we had to wait two more days to go and talk to a manager before finally getting an exchange. I think we'll be Home Depot paint customers from now on.

We also bought a flat half gallon of the same paint color we'd used on the bottom, so we could sand and paint back over it. What we thought would be a one day job turned into four, but at long last we finished!! Here are some after pics:




And with a little floral styling:

We still need to put more stuff up on the walls, but I already think the house is looking so much cooler and so much more "us" with all this paint! Who knew!

I'll make sure to take more "during" pics when we do our bedroom! PAINT!

Paint Colors:
Below Chair Rail - SW Wall Street
Above Chair Rail - SW Evening Shadow