Dining Room DIY Makeover

So we have been in our home just over a year now, and looking back I've realised that we've actually accomplished a lot over that time! And when I say we, I really mean my husband with me giving "directions". Some things have been easy to change and only needed new paint, others have been a major renovation project, which I will share later. 

I don't have any particular style in mind with our home, I just know what I like and don't like. If you go to my Home and Interiors Pinterest board you will see it's a bit of a mishmash of different colours and styles, but heavily featuring grey tones and crisp white.  Our home was built in 1983 and features a lot of wood, cream and peach. Some people are into that country wooden look but it's not for me. When I look at it I just see tired and dated. (Although at the same time it reminds me of my childhood home so also oddly familiar and comforting). The other strong feature of our home are the large wooden beams that are in the kitchen, dining room, lounge and master bedroom. 

These photos are from the real estate marketing with the previous owners furniture. It gives you a good idea of the type of style they had and how everything pretty much went with their furniture!

For the dining room I wanted to go for something really different. The dining room sits between the kitchen and lounge as a seperate space, rather than part of another room. I really wanted to make it stand out and. It's hard to describe in my mind what I was thinking of, but it turned out a lot better than I imagined! When we had the test pots of colour on the wall, there were some raised eyebrows! But since it's been painted we've only had positive comments. My only opinion with colour is that it's just paint- if you don't like it then paint over it! 

You have to excuse the mess! This is after we moved in with some test colour on the wall. A pretty dramatic change! Also check out that dining room light!

The "during" process. Wallpaper gone, beams being painted

The process was fairly straight forward. Our whole house (including the laundry and bathroom) was wallpapered in the same cream, slightly textured and shiny wallpaper. It makes me wonder if they got some kind of buy one get 20 rolls free kind of special deal!! It was also a very narrow width, maybe 40cm and with large rooms there were lots of joins. If you have wallpaper in good condition it is fine to paint over it but because of the joins, the texture of the paper and some of the areas around the windows were really bad, we decided the best option was to remove it. This was all my husbands hard work, along with all the painting. We also needed to replace a section of the gib board underneath the windows as water had leaked but this was only a minor fix. Anyway, after some prepping it was all good to go with painting, starting with the ceiling and beams. It was amazing to see the difference to the room even with just having the ceiling lighter. 

Let's just let the after pictures speak for themselves...... 

Most days we can look out the window to the Titahi Bay inlet and further beyond to the Tasman Sea. I fell in love with the sea views when we looked at the house!

The door to the kitchen has been taken off for painting, so you can see part of my emergency kit (!) and into  the kitchen. The entrance to the lounge is a wide double doorway. 

My babies look great in black and white on the dark walls! Our dining room table was completely refinished (for another blog post!)

Our Wellington painting looks fabulous contrasting on the dark walls. 

Original artwork by my father in law, Simon Turner

What do you think? It's almost my favourite coloured room in our house, although I do really like the colours we choose for our boys bedrooms. I really like the way the crisp white makes the colour pop. It's a hard colour to describe, a dark blue grey, but it changes depending on the light. We are lucky to have huge windows that let a lot of natural light in so the room doesn't feel closed in or dark. A light room with dark walls is an interesting mix! 

Wall colours Resene "Gumboot"
Trims painted Resene Lustacryl
Beams Resene ceiling white
Pendant light from Lighting Plus

Hope you enjoyed this sneak peak into my home, I hope to post a few more over the coming months :)