New Old House Dining Room Reveal

While I posted a few table settings over the holidays I haven’t officially shared our finished dining room with you.

Here’s where we started when we first saw the house during a showing: basic brass chandelier, no crown molding, and a chair rail too small for the size of the room.

Because we don’t have an eat-in kitchen, this was an important room to work on as it gets a lot of use; we eat most meals here daily.

We started by adding crown molding and beefing up the chair rail {all part of that “as long as the contractors are in the house it must be better to have them do this too!” dangerous mindset.  Yeah, not so much!}.  The next project was to paint below the chair rail and add a beautiful bronze grasscloth wallpaper from Thibaut.  Finally, we switched out the light fixture for the Sausalito Pendant from Troy Lighting.

And here you can see how convenient it really is for us to eat in this space ~ I literally take things right off the stove to the table.  I was very worried about not having an eat-in kitchen for the first time in a house and haven’t missed it at all.  In fact, I’m loving that we actually use our dining room all the time and it isn’t a wasted room.  {and it’s especially nice to have that swinging door to close when I’ve made a big mess in the kitchen!}

But my favorite part of this room is the new art.

I spent a lot of time in Tokyo scouring Shrine Sales for all sorts of goodies, and  my favorite things to purchase with no real idea what I’d ever do with them were vintage obis {Darling Husband, please pretend you didn’t read that and remember this all worked out perfectly in the end!}.

However, as I worked on this room and unpacked our belongings from storage and the cargo shipment I figured out what to do with those beautiful obis ~ I bit the bullet, cut them and framed them!

And the wall with all four

And of course you can’t miss Mona, our Daniel Kelly fish {named this because her eyes follow you wherever you stand in the room – What?  You don’t name your art?}  She’s such a favorite piece of ours that we intentionally hung her in a place where she could be admired from multiple rooms at the same time.

In addition to holding our china and crystal, the hutch in this room holds a special collection:  our Kiddush cups.  We have cups from The Husband’s Bar Mitzvah and now Big Cutie’s and my Bat Mitzvahs.  There’s a hand-painted one we used at our wedding, ones we’ve picked up in our travels, and even ones The Cuties and I have all made.

That dark blue one in back?  The stem is filled with the crushed glass that The Husband stomped on as our wedding guests cried Mazel Tov and we were pronounced Husband and Wife ~ pretty cool, eh?

So there you have it.  It’s a formal dining room and we use it all the time.  Nothing’s terribly precious.

As evidenced by the literal spit-takes elicited at the dinner table last night.  Where’s an eye-rolling emoji when you need one?