Woman in Real Life

We cracked open a couple of windows on the weekend and it felt like spring was so close I could taste it. Smell it actually. And what I smelled was mud. The kind of mud that comes from a lawn that spent months buried under heavy snow. Maybe it's a smell that can't compete with roses, but it's nevertheless quite welcome in these parts. And open windows - that is living the dream! Even if they are only open a crack, and only for a couple of hours.

Six blog posts. Five weeks. A completely different dining room. I'm not going to say it's been easy. Spare time was hard to come by. And I picked up a cold at dance competition this past weekend (tight quarters in those dressing rooms!), so I'm writing this with itchy eyes and tissue in hand. But our One Room Challenge dining room makeover is done! And we love our new dining room space. We might actually eat in there now. (Or at the very least, not pile random items on the dining table.) Let's have a wee look at the before and after pics to see how far we've come.

The "Before" - this room is long gone now!

It was glorious to have a whole weekend to dedicate to our One Room Challenge dining room makeover this past weekend. No sporting events to take the kids to - just uninterrupted painting and installation time. (Okay it wasn't entirely uninterrupted - that would be impossible - but we got in a good stretch of work hours.)

It's One Room Challenge week 4, and we're getting to the point where we can really see how the dining room is going to come together. The mood board is one thing, but real life results can look a lot different. Fortunately we are loving how the dining room looks so far.

In last week's update, I told you how we managed to get a bit of work done over the Easter long weekend. Unfortunately this last weekend we were out of town from Friday to Sunday for my son's basketball tournament. That's the job when you're a parent though, right? I'm sort of glad in a way, because I think it's fitting if I can show you how we managed to make over our dining room in just five weeks while still conducting our regular business, like work, tax preparation, cooking, cleaning and parenting. The blog is called Woman in Real Life after all. And real life means you don't often have a lot of spare time for diys and decor.

Thankfully this past weekend was a 4-day weekend for us, without any activities to shuttle kids to. We did dog-sit a large puppy and attend two Easter dinner parties, but there was at least some free time to work on our dining room makeover for the One Room Challenge.

That's a good thing, because we are at week 3 (out of 6) already! Seeing as week 6 is the reveal, we have three weeks left to go. Where are we at with it? By last week, most of what was accomplished was painting. From there, we planned to move onto wallpaper, picking a paint colour for the secondhand china cabinet and installing some of the mouldings.

The weeks fly by quickly, don't they? Especially when you are renovating a whole room in just five weeks. It has already been a week since the launch of the spring One Room Challenge. You might recall from my first post that we are making over our dining room to create a more sophisticated space that coordinates with our newly renovated foyer.

We progressed fairly well considering that we're doing all the work ourselves and both my husband and I were busy with other things every single day of the week. Things like our regular work and orthodontic appointments and then an entire weekend taken up by our daughter's dance competition (me on duty for hair, makeup and cheering on) and our son's basketball tournament (he on duty for driving and cheering on).

I think most of us in the north are pretty much on the same page right now - ready for spring! Bring it. The temperature dipped below zero again yesterday, but I am confident that actual, lovely spring is just days away!

In the meantime, I have brought some light and flowery spring decor touches into my home. I'm sharing them today as part of a Canadian bloggers spring home tour with 20 other bloggers. Thank you to Shannon and Christina for hosting the tour, which goes on all week. Be sure to check out the other homes decked out for spring by following the links at the bottom of this post.

A couple weeks back I felt like I was getting all the things done super early for Christmas. Then the calendar hit December today and I was like, "Wait a second. What happened?" I have a bazillion things to do still to get the house ready for Christmas. Not to mention gifts to buy and cookies to bake.

Perhaps beginning a diy foyer renovation in late October wasn't the wisest idea. (My husband has been toiling away on the trim in the evenings and on weekends.) But the refreshed foyer is sure going to make a serene and lovely backdrop for our Christmas decor! In the meantime, I was able to whip together this Christmas wreath for our freshly painted front door yesterday.