Dining Rooms, Not Just For Dining

It all started with the purchase of a new dining table...

We originally went to the furniture store(every one in the county) to look for a bunk bed, but we found this amazing dining room table!! Hubby worked his negotiating magic and got it for way cheap!! SCORE

I have hated this arch since the beginning of time... seriously the moment i walked into our newly bought never before seen house, i thought to myself that arch will have to go... and then i thought that built in cabinet will have to go. We took out one of those things the next week. The other had to wait 2 years.

It was going to be a simple project, pound out the arch and put molding up. But nothing is ever simple in our house NOTHING!! The arches were apparently meant to last through the nuclear holocaust, so i took a few swings at it, and then relinquished the hammer to husband. It is not only concrete and plaster but also wrapped in a metal mesh and reenforced with couple blockes of wood, hammered into the studs with 4 inch nails (if these nails were hand forged it would not have surprised me)

Then, my other half points out that if we nail up some molding now his head would probably hit it... Devastated, thats what i was!!! he must have saw this on my face because he continued for the next two hours pounding out all the plaster and cutting out the metal mesh from the bottom of the header! We are still finding chunks of plaster hiding places!

I was so excited about the color i had original picked out for the hallway wall. I got the little sample cans and painted up some patches expecting to love it, but wound up HATING IT. We went back to the drawing board, and completely changed our paint pallet!!

This is what we wound up with after moulding and paint!!

So the obvious next step would be to paint the dining room (not finish the room upstairs)

We move all of the stuff in here to the basement and the "storage room" and begin prepping the walls, and pulling off moulding... I would post a pic of the blue we painted the walls but i hated it s much that we had to go back and paint it a darker shade.

 AFTER we built in some book shelves of course... the room looked so empty and our OLD book shelves didnt match our NEW table

So after 2 and a half months of building and painting, this is what we got!!

We had to move an outlet, from the left wall, it was going to be half way covered by the cabinet, so we re wired it to the first shelf on the back wall, and now our printer has a new home!

the door is still a work in progress.. and probably will be for quite some time, after about three layers of paint we got down to paint that will NOT submit to the chemicals and sanding and scraping. We did however fix the structural problem of the whole door frame falling out of the wall... locking the door was kind of silly, because turns out all you had to do was yank it really hard and the whole think would fall out :P 

Then there is the bench... i have decided to call the window seat/bench, the banquet!! it sounds so formal that way.

We have not yet ordered the doors for the banquet so we cannon finish it up until those are hung, but we plan on staining the seat the same color as the table top and chairs!!

Now our new fantastic dining room can be used for dining... and sewing... and painting... and joy school,  and storage,  and office space,  and growing herbs, and well anything really, it is so functional!!!

The doors we ordered from Here, and they are beautiful!

And the plans for the bookshelves were drawn up using THIS tutorial

We modified it quite a bit, and wound up building our own cabinet boxes but still a very helpful tutorial!!