(I know, it’s a pretty straight forward title… but it is what it is.)
Yep, painting the dining room will seem pretty similar to painting the master bedroom: spoiler alert… I’m going with gray! At least it will be a bit more transformative than when we painted the foyer from dingy white to bright white!
Here we go… the before: Yes, that’s mint green trim.
I don’t know why there isn’t a window here. We could use the light. (The giant windows that look out onto the porch don’t actually let very much light inside.)
When the previous owners took their built-in, we were left with some lacking quarter round. It’s okay though, we will be replacing the baseboard.
I don’t know what this is: phone jack? If it is, we have been pulling out all of the phone jacks in the house (none of which looked like this one.)
Here are some of our renovations that had already crept into the dining room from the kitchen. The trim-less, expanded doorway and a new light switch.
Here are some tight shots of that mint green trim. The little doodad corner things aren’t our style, but were tired of ripping things apart – so this will just get painted for now.
The ends of these lines are not even. 🙁 Yes, it bugs me. Why go through the effort to make something “fancy” and then do this?
Time to paint! I actually painted the window trim first. Even with a primer coat, that drywall mud around the door makes paint act differently. It just kind of slides around.
Yay more cutting in!
It was only after (way after) I started cutting in against the ceiling did I realize that the previous owners had painted over a wallpaper border. (You can sort of see a faint line near the bottom of the paint line.) Darn it! Oh well, I wasn’t going to try to take it off and it was very subtle anyway. I might have tried removing it if I had noticed beforehand… but it had already been painted over.
Phase two: spray paint the vents! No popular “Oil Rubbed Bronze” for me… “Flat Soft Iron” is like a pretty, glittery, but not too glittery, gun metal gray.
The vents were already the perfect size and there was no reason to replace them with new ones if spray paint was an acceptable option. I know they are basic, but a really nice upgrade would have been making wooden vent covers to match the floor… and that really had to happen upon flooring instillation. No vent upgrade for us – I’ll let guests get distracted with the new light switches.
Vents in process of drying in the garage:
The “finished for now” dining room. (That baseboard is actually just cut to length and not installed yet.)
Another angle:
We will also be pulling off the trim around the dining room/living room transition – just like the openings between the kitchen/dining room & foyer/kitchen. Another time.
And just to remind you of a slightly more impressive renovation, a view from the kitchen: