the unblogged room

Our dining room has gotten very little attention on this blog. We switched out the table when we moved back in after the big part of the renovation, but there's more to this room than the table...we just haven't blogged about it.

The room is far from being completely finished, but it's waaaaay better than it used to be.

Here is the dining room before the water damage (during a fun little mystery party):

The dining room went through various stages of life pre-water damage. When we decided to add a staircase to the basement by cutting a hole in the living room floor, we turned the dining room into our living room. This picture was taken in our dining-room-turned-living room the day Emma (baby #2) was born:

Once the family room was put back together, the dining table came back into the room. This picture was taken the week baby Isa (#3) was born:

Then, the water damage happened. Here's the dining room when we first moved out to start fixing the damage. The hardwood floors had to be dried so they wouldn't warp from the water. Interesting process. These big mats have little holes and are hooked up to air hoses that circulated air through them for several days.

We always knew we wanted to keep the rough plaster walls (we love the original plaster and had to lose most of it because of the water). So in the dining room we kept the rough walls, but smoothed out the ceiling. HUGE difference! We also widened out this doorway and squared it off (it had rounded edges before). Then Michael added some beautiful trim and crown molding that was at least twice the size of what was there before. Trim makes an amazing difference.

When we first moved back into the house, the dining room looked like this for several weeks. The appliances couldn't go into the kitchen until the floor was down so they stayed in the dining room along with all the tools to finish the kitchen. YIKES! I'm beyond happy that we've come so far and are way beyond this now. It was a great day when we cleared this out and took down the shower-curtain-liner curtains. Pretty, huh?

Then we moved in the fireplace that Michael made for our other house, got the new table, rug, light fixture, etc. I'll blog more later this week about other details in the room. It's still not 'done' but, like in every room of our house, it's fun to look back at what it was and how much better it is now.