The first week of our dining room renovation saw a lot of fast progress with plaster repair, electrical, and hanging our ceiling medallion and antique chandelier. This week was about making the room feel cohesive with a very simple but yet huge game changer: primer and paint.
In case you missed our other dining room renovation posts, check out our dining room plans and what we accomplished in Week 1.
A constant theme for me in any of our renovation projects is finding natural or health-conscious products. Figuring out a primer for our plaster that wasn’t going to cause mega fumes (as I feared the recommended Kilz primer would) was probably the most stressful bit of research out of this entire dining room renovation. Lucky for me that on the very day we needed it, I happened to learn that Benjamin Moore’s zero-VOC Natura paint line also made a primer for plaster (511)!
When trying it, the primer lived up to expectations with virtually no scent and coating our raw plaster very well. It also held up perfectly when we started painting the wall color over it, keeping the paint from soaking in.
We painted both the ceiling and walls; the ceiling and medallion got a coat of bright white, and the walls…
If you remember back to the end of last week, I was questioning my longtime choice of using dark green walls in the dining room such as this:
Well, so far I’m glad to have listened to my growing gut instinct to go lighter, because my design-loving brain is doing a little jig right now as I look at our room.
The walls got a splash of a warm and creamy off-white in Benjamin Moore’s Dove White OC-17. And I love it.
For the first time since ripping out the built-ins and scraping off the unholy 4 layers of wallpaper, the dining room’s walls are all the same color! #happydance
Now, despite the wall color change, not much of my “vision” for the decor of the dining room has changed. I’m still planning to use gold or brass gilded wall frames, antique wood-stained furniture, and blues and greens. It will just be a bright room now with the lighter walls versus moody dark walls. Here’s some fun pix that show the direction I’m going for with the dining room’s aesthetics:
I am so dang biting at the bit to get our crown molding and picture rail up so I can begin decorating!
Can I also say that it is ridiculously hard to find emerald green curtains? Or even material! I want it to be a heavy faux suade kind of fabric – I’m going for plush! I had found THE PERFECT fabric at Joanne’s for a good price, but there were only 2 yards of it at the store. So when I inquired if they had more, they said it had been discontinued and no neighboring stores had more than 2 yards. #iwantitback
After that I’ve had no further luck and I’m still on the hunt.
If you take anything away from this stage of the dining room renovation, it’s to not be afraid to do a last-minute pivot with your design or a color or whatever your gut is telling you. Be daring in design and have fun!
The next big step is getting our crown moldings and picture rail and staining them, so I’ll be writing more about that all in good time (be sure to be alerted by subscribing to our email list!).
Shared On: totallyterrifictuesday
