Our New Living and Dining Rooms

Hello friends!  (If you're still my friend after all this time!)

I will start by saying that we've been busy since our move to Cincinnati last June.  Busy with the house, busy with school (kindergarten for Nina, pre-school for Henry), busy with jobs (Brent works from home and the move has been great for him.  I am still working as a mama-at-home.)  My immediate family mostly lives in Ohio so we've been busy with them too.  We are happy and feeling so very thankful for what we have in life.

But occasionally one of my friends or long-distance family will say to me "Seriously?  With Nina and Henry's rooms on your blog?  Still?  Can't you post something new?"  :)  I admit, my heart has been more into doing the projects than posting about the projects, but after my long absence, we've managed to get quite a bit done.  I thought you might like to see!

Here is a before shot of our living room/front room/whatever you want to call it.  This and the dining room (which you can see connects on the left side of the photo) were the only rooms on the main floor that hadn't been converted to hardwood floors...

...so the first thing we did was convert them!  I think the house is happy to have her floors all shiny and new throughout the first floor.  We also attacked all of that dark wood trim.  (Although most of the time it felt like it was attacking me, not the other way around!  That stuff can really soak up the paint!)  I love how much brighter the whole room feels.

Another angle of the room gives you a sense of how large it is.  I struggle with placing the furniture in such a way that it doesn't achieve the "spin cycle effect," where everything looks like it's just smashed against the walls.  Placing my desk at a right angle from the wall seemed to help a bit.

This room gets a ton of light and I love to sit here and read sometimes.  The armoire in the background is great storage for all my junk that no one wants to see!

Here is a before shot of the dining room.  When we got into the redecorating, we realized there had been wallpaper in this room that the previous owner had painted over with a sponge technique.  We had no choice but to just paint over it: that stuff wasn't coming down!  Still crossing my fingers that it holds up with all those layers on the walls!

Here is the dining room now.  Lots of fresh paint, new curtains, new chandelier, new hardwood floors.  My husband augmented the chair rail that was already in the room with some vertical boards to make it look like board and batten.  We just painted the entire lower half of the wall, including trim, the same color, and it turned out great!

Here's a view of the room as you're standing in the living room.  You can see my kids' silhouettes and my collection of pretty dishes hanging on the walls.  The gorgeous fabric on the pillows that flank the hutch is called Bosporus Toile, and I got it at this website.

We've done a lot more so I hope to have the time in the coming weeks to share it.  I've listed my paint colors below for you, in case it might help.  I hope you all are doing well too!  :)

Living/Dining Room Trim Color: Sherwin Williams "Roman Column"
Living/Dining Room Wall Color: Sherwin Williams "Sea Salt" (mixed at 60% strength)