KItchen Progress

My clients kitchen is moving right along...

Remember these before shots...

Well, things have been moving right along...

(Don't panic, the fridge will have matching cabinet door fronts on it!)

We've also moved this archway towards the entry way to expand their dining room...

(The above table, chairs, and light fixture may be for sale...email me if you're interested)

And we've gotten the floors refinished in something....not so orange!

I can't wait for this Restoration Hardware table to go in their new, spacious, dining room...

Shameless Plug:  If you live in North Alabama and order something from Restoration Hardware, your furniture will be delivered by the great guys from New Latitude Movers, which is the moving and delivery company where my husband works.

 With this chandelier for a little glitz...

Progress is fun!  

Thanks for checking in!

A room I'd actually like to dine in!

We hung my grandmother's chandelier!  Finally!
I've been hating our chandelier since the day we moved in, so I'm so glad to finally get up something that I love!

Before:

After:

Also in the name of being less prissy in our dining room, I removed the cafe curtains from the windows...

Before:

After:

I also added in a few more antlers.  I probably have too many antlers in our house, but my husband loves to hunt so we have tons of them.  They're free and such an easy way to add a natural, rustic element to a room.  

The bad news is, this window is directly across from our bathroom, and so I'm trying to figure out how to add back in a little privacy.  I'm deciding between bamboo shades or some sort of gauzy pocket panel cafe curtains gathered on upper and lower rods...not sure what the word for that is.

I'm finally happy with our dining room!  (At least for today.)

Thanks Grandma (actually, "Grandmother" as she was called)!

Before:

After:

A little less prissy, a little more me.

People are always commenting and inquiring about the wall of hats in our dining room.  They were my grandmother hats, and they are all fabulous and unique.

I have loved having them displayed as a focal point in our home, but it was making our dining room so feminine and prissy...especially when paired with our floral rug and floral cafe curtains.  So I x-ed the cafe curtains, for now, and I shook things up a bit with the hat wall.

I made the back wall of our dining room more of a salon wall, with the vintage hats as the main element.  This feels a little more casual to me, and a little more "me".

Don't worry...I know our chandelier is the real downer in our dining room!  Just ask my husband, I complain about it constantly.  But luckily, this weekend we are getting started restoring an old chandelier that was my grandmothers!  It will be much better!  I can't wait!

Dining Room Revamp

I have been pretty unsatisfied with our dining room lately.  Which, probably has a lot to do with our chandelier, but I am going to take care of that later...hopefully soon.  But it also had something to do the furniture arrangement.  I made a few adjustments, and I'm much happier now.

Before:

 The back wall in this room is so large, and is such a focal point in the dining room, and from the living room.  Even though the hats are interesting, there was nothing strong and substantial on this wall.  Everything is little and choppy.  I think this is a common problem for us starter-outers, cause it's expensive to acquire large pieces of art.  

When I got this china cabinet, I knew it probably needed to be wear the other chest is.  I avoided making the switch because I didn't want to rehang my hats (it's a huge pain) and I wanted the hats to remain a focal point from the living room.  So I was sort of stuck about what to do with them.  So I just wedged the china cabinet in this corner here and lived with it for a while.  

Then when I hung these cafe curtains on this window, the space beneath the window looked so naked.  

I loved the way the window looked, but there were distracting elements on either side of it, and no real show piece beneath it.

I love this cross-stitch artwork, but it is so dark and brown, and so it wasn't really fitting with the colorfulness of the room.  

After:

Now the china cabinet provides the substance that I need on the wall.  Covering the wall with hats provides more of the statement I need across the whole wall, instead of just a vignette over the sideboard.

I can't take this chandelier any longer.  I have an idea for a diy chandelier, but I've gotta find the right time to get Chris to help me.  I have to be careful, because he sometimes feels like a slave in my master plan.  

Okay, I know I've had the same center piece for almost a year.  I really need to do something different!  

I love this bird pictures.  They were my grandmothers and they are made with real feathers.  I had to keep them somewhere in the room, because the feathers tie in so well with the feathery hats.

I have to vent...don't you love how they centered the alarm system perfectly on the wall so that nothing pretty can ever be hung there?  That was definitely the work of a man.    

So I didn't have to sacrifice my hat wall, after all!  It just got bigger.  

This piece still needs a little styling.  

BT-dub, the picture on the right is of the original deFuniak/Kelley/McGill house in Birmingham...basically the home of my ancestors.  I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it's a really cool old house.  It used to sit where City Hall is now.  

 I love having this piece of furniture against this fabric.  I have seen antique sideboards where instead of having a mirror as a "backsplash" board, they have a piece of fabric.  I can't find a picture.  But this reminds me of that.  I also like having all the color of the curtains up against the colorless silver and crystal.  (In real life, the crystal doesn't disappear like it does in this picture.)

Since I really wanted my window to be the feature, I was excited when I remembered I had this sconces in the attic from college.  I have always loved these sconces, but I haven't been able to figure out the right place for them.  

A little antecdote about these sconces.  When we were buying wired sconces for our bathroom, Chris turned to me and said..."Wait a minute!  Don't you already have those sconces from college!?", thinking he was about to save some money and secretly so proud he knew what a sconce was.  I was like, "Yes sweetie... but they are candlelight.  This is 2009."  

So, here's the recap...

Before:

After:

Thanks for reading.  

You're gonna put hats....on the wall!?

When Chris and I were engaged we were living in Tuscaloosa.  I was in summer school and he was working for Campus Crusade.  After the wedding, we planned to stay in Tuscaloosa and be on staff with Campus Crusade.  We would be moving into a rental house, owned by a friend.  They house was currently vacant, so our friend allowed us to go ahead and start setting up our things in the house so it would be ready after the wedding.  

I would go over one afternoon and decorate a little.

Chris would go over another day and move some of his stuff in.

Needless to say...a clash of tastes was soon evident.  There were snide remarks flying back and forth about what would or WOULDN'T be so "fly in our new hizzy".  

See, Chris, the bachelor, had this burning fear that he would be living in a girl's house...and not the other way around.  He'd seen my funky style of dressing, and worried that our house would be "over the top". He was hoping for a more normal, neutral abode.  

Well, as the story goes...IT ALL HIT THE FAN when he saw an old fashioned looking box sitting in the dining room.  

"What's in that box?" he asked.

"My grandmother's hats", I said calmly.

"Your grandmother's hats!?" he remarked back, "What are you going to do with them?!"

"I was thinking I would just sort of hang them all over this wall..." I answered.

"Are you serious!" Chris exclaimed!

Let me correct myself, it went on from there and THIS IS WHEN IT ALL HIT THE FAN.  To date, this remains the token decorating fight of all time.   

Well, we didn't end up living in that house.  The landlord sold the house and we moved to Birmingham. We moved out all our belongings the week before our wedding, came back from our honeymoon, only to bounce from place to place for a month, then finally land in an apartment in Birmingham.  The full story is in this post.

Anyway, Chris and I had a year to cool down after the hat fiasco, and he grew to trust me and my decorating taste.  These days, I think he's quite fond of the hats in our dining room. 

Anyway, here's the behind the scenes on the process... 

-First, I chose the wall and centered up the chest where I wanted it. 

-Then, I got a level and drew four level horizontal lines at equal distances apart.

-Next, I drew three vertical level lines at equal distances apart.

-This created a grid, and I would center my hats at each cross point.  

-I decided which hats I wanted to use and started laying them out on the floor to decide which one would go where.

-When I had decided what hats would go where, I held the hats, centered over the cross points, then decided where my nail should go (each hat is different).  

Then I styled the surface below.  I liked the contrast of all the silver tones, against all of the colorful hats.

I hope you like it.  Thanks for reading!

Making it feel like HOME: Our Dining Room

Our dining room went from this...

To this...(smooth ceilings, paint, crown moulding)

Wall color is Benjamin Moore Coastal Fog 976, Trim is Benjamin Moore Sandy Hook Gray HC 108, ceiling is Benjamin Moore Tapestry Beige OC-32, doors are Benjamin Moore Kingsport Gray HC-86.  

Then to this... (refinished floors)

Floors are stained High Gloss Dark Walnut.

And eventually, to this...

This dining room table actually came from Chris's fraternity house at the U. of Alabama (Phi Gamma Delta).  It was more of a reddish color, and pretty beaten up so they got rid of them and Chris snagged it (we weren't even dating at the time).  He stored it for three or four years until we bought our house.  We sanded the finish off, distressed it, and then stained it Dark Walnut with a high gloss poly finish.  Unfortunately, this was before our blogging days and we didn't take any pictures of the process, sorry!
I spray painted these wooden chairs metallic silver (more in a future post).

I had some leftover burlap from another project (I'm tellin' you...you always gotta have some burlap around), and so I just cut a strip to make a runner.
These crystal candlesticks were one of my favorite wedding gifts!

This china cabinet is on loan from my sister, Emily.  As any recent bride would be, I was desperate to get my hands on a china cabinet to display our new china!  The right side of it opens up into a desk.  It's very old and belonged to my Great Uncle Somebody.  I think I'll try and fix it up a little bit and put new knobs on it.  

This is a neat little old child's desk, that I love, but it's totally falling apart.  Notice the leftward lean.  Chris has already tried to fix it once and I think it's hopeless.  I still love it though.  

This is a neat old cross-stitched picture of the Doxology.  It's, also, on loan from my sister, Emily.

 These three pictures were my grandmother's.  They are made with real feathers.  Sometimes I can't get enough of "bird paraphernalia".
The curtains are from IKEA.

I'm not so crazy about the light fixture, but that'll be another project.  

In the left corner is a painting my sister Liz did for us for a wedding gift.  It's painted on a glass window pane and it's Chris dipping me during our first dance.  

My grandmother had the most fabulous style!  Our house is full of her things.  She was a fashionista and even went to Parsons Design School in NYC for Apparel Design.  (I majored in Apparel Design at UA.)  These are some of her hats from the 1940s.  I have boxes full.  I hung them on a grid on this wall.  (More in a future post).

We love to have our guests pick a favorite hat.  What's your favorite?

I guess this is our...bar?

View from the kitchen...

That's all folks, at least for now.

Thanks for Reading.