Dining Room Refresh

Oh my it’s been forever friends…………Red Shed Designs has been rocking and rolling and we have so many things we are working on and not enough time to get them all done.  Does your life ever feel that way?  I have so many cool ideas in my head and new designs I want to make I need to slow down sometimes and focus or nothing seems to get done.  We recently purchased a new laser cutter which is super exciting and the possibilities are endless on what we can create but I will save those details for another blog post.

Today I want to talk about some recent home renovations we have been working on. As many of you know my background/college degree is in Interior Design so I always have a home project I want to work on, but I have been pretty content the last several years with how our home looks and have focused most of my time on jewelry making and our business.  Our front living room area and dining room which flow together was in need of an update and I have been wanting to come up with some new décor so over Spring Break those two rooms got a much needed refresh.  Jason and I are big DIYer’s so we do all the work ourselves and have fun brainstorming ideas and working on the projects together, we have done so many home renovation projects together so this time I took pictures so I could share what we did with all of you.     

Before & After Pictures

So my front living room had an accent wall and it was a pretty burnt orange color, which I loved but probably painted 7 years ago and it was in need of a new lighter color.  It also had a faux fireplace mantel that my Dad built me probably 16 or 17 years ago back when Trading Spaces was really big (so cool that the show is making a comeback), I was obsessed with that show back in the day and I used to watch it with a sketch pad and draw out ideas on things I wanted to build.  My Dad would then take my sketches and turn them into reality, he made me this fireplace mantel and a really huge geometric wall shelf that I loved for many years.  So I took the fireplace mantel off the wall and decided to revamp it into a rustic European mantel and move it into my Dining Room.  So here are pictures of that process……

My Dining Room had a chair rail with sage green above and a cool wallpaper technique below but again I did this probably 7 or 8 years ago so I was ready for something new.  The wall paper was ripped into random pieces and then you slap the pieces on the wall and it makes a pretty cool pattern. 

So we ended up taking the chair rail down and stripping all the wall paper off, we had a lot of patching & sanding to do to ensure the walls were smooth so you couldn’t tell where the chair rail used to be.  So once the patching and sanding were complete it was time to paint. 

My favorite color these days is Olive Green, it seems to make it’s way into most of my fashion so why not put it on my walls?  I choose Shade-Grown by Sherwin Williams for one wall in my Dining Room and a small wall in my entry way, this color is so good!!!  For the other walls I brightened things up with a greige color called Agreeable Gray by Sherwin Williams it is such a pretty color too and really brightened the spaces and made them look bigger. We also updated our light fixture, we took off the glass globes and purchased Edison bulbs this was an inexpensive way to change the look even more. I am linking some of the things we used to decorate the space after we painted and freshened it up.

Part 2 of this blog post will be coming soon, I will show you what we did to our front living room. We enjoyed doing this update and love the outcome, I hope you guys like it too, let me know in the comments.