Before & After: Dining Room

Summer is here and we’ve made a lot of progress on our house. The dinning room walls are finally done and the woodwork is painted. We thought the dinning room wouldn’t be so bad, till we took down the many layers of wallpaper. In many places the plaster was pulling away from the wood lath beneath it. In some areas the plaster was unsalvageable and we had to replace large sections with drywall.
If we had the budget we probably would have pulled off all the plaster and installed fresh drywall, but, since that was not a possibility we got to work with our new favorite tool “Loctite” and started the slow process of repairing the walls. Drilling lots of small holes and filling the holes with Loctite and then using screws and large washers to “pull” the plaster back to the lath. It’s time consuming but economical.

Like the other rooms we’ve worked on, this one required many hours of sanding, spackling, and more sanding, ugh – sanding is my least favorite part of the process. But, we persevered and gradually our work paid off.
After all the repair work was done we primed with KILZ stain blocker. The big lesson we learned on the dining room, DO NOT cheap out on the wall paint. We bought the cheaper brand of Sherwin Williams wall paint at Lowes and were not very happy with the final look. We also found that the better quality paint makes the job much easier, especially for woodwork.
Here’s the final result. We may end up repainting the dining room walls, but for now it’s nice to have another room cleaned up and livable.
 Our new vintage danish dining table was a Craigslist purchase from two very  nice guys who sell as Meet Modernism, also on Etsy, Ebay and Facebook, and live close to Harrisburg. I love the wood tone and the fact that it has 2 leaves that expand to seat eight.

Next, we’re looking for 2 vintage lounge chairs to add a seating area to the room, and we’ll be hanging more artwork.
Our dining room will make entertaining fun, so we’re looking forward to hosting family holiday meals here. Every time we finish a room it helps motivate us to work on the next one!