Before

Our old dining room furniture has seen better days - back in Lori's first apartment quite a few years ago. The fan came with the house. Besides being a wimpy little thing, it wasn't balanced so it vibrated and was noisy when it ran. We also needed to move Lori's sewing machine out of the room. Although it was convenient and she could watch TV while she sewed, the white cabinet and plastic drawers just weren't going to go with our new furniture and the new look of the dining room. 

New lights mean a new wall

Lori wanted sconce lights. Lori wanted the sconce lights on a different switch than the overhead light. Aaron had to crawl around the hot, messy, cramped, attic to wire the sconces. If you look at the first picture, you'll see why we had to take out the wall. There is a cripple right above the switch box that prevented Aaron from just dropping the wire down from the attic. Opening the wall gave us a chance to redo the insulation but it brings us to a major undertaking - now we want smooth walls througout the house.

Open Wall

Almost closed

The patching begins

The Walls

Our house was built in 1967 and has seen multiple owners and perhaps multiple tenants. The walls are not in the best of shape. Various paint shades of off-white, both glossy and flat, were used throughout the house. The dining room walls were particularly bad because a previous owner (or an incompetent contractor) did a really awful job walling up the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. We planned to retexture the walls, but after Aaron finished patching the screwholes and joints in the new wall, he couldn't bear to put texture on his now smooth wall. So after priming all the walls, he skim coated them to make them smooth. We only left the ceiling textured becaue it wasn't too bad. It had been retextured at some point because the original ceilings were a popcorn type with sparkles in them. Yes, you read correctly. Well, it was 1967. 

Once the walls were smooth and primed again, we could paint. Lori selected Martha Stewart paint colors: sea grass for the walls and pale naples yellow for the ceiling. You can't really tell the color from the picture. The walls are a pale green. Note our new stained glass ceiling lamp.

 

A fresh coat of paint
Must climb to highest thing in room	You can't make me come down
I like it up here

The Floors

We have hardwood floors in the dining room and living room and also underneath the carpeted hallway and bedrooms. The floors were in OK condition but had some scrapes and more noticeably there was raw wood where the wrought iron railings once were. We tried a chemical refinishing product from Home Depot, but after trying it out we felt it wasn't going to do the job. Also, by getting down on our hands and knees to apply the stuff we saw how bad the floors really were. Once our furniture is delivered, we don't plant to move it because it's so heavy. So now was the time to refinish the floors and we wanted to do it right. We hopped in the truck and zipped over to Home Depot to rent a floor sander.

Newly sanded floor	Sanding is a messy job!
Aaron staining the floor	We're not sure if Sammy approves of a floor that's the same color as he is
Now the unpacking -- some things were packed in our apartment in Sunnyvale and just got unpacked now!	Almost done... note the trim at the top of the ceiling. We tried Crown Molding, but it didn't look right and it didn't cut right. We thought we understood geometry. We did, it's just that we assumed incorrectly that 4 pieces of molding from the same bin at the same store would be the same size and profile.

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