Woman in Real Life

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).

Over the past few days I have used muscles that I'm quite sure I had never used before. Not for a very long time anyway! My husband had been installing our beautiful millwork from Metrie whenever he had a spare moment or two over the last few weeks. You can read more about that process and our paint choices in this post.

Then I heard there was an opening in the Canadian Bloggers Holiday Home Tour this week and I thought, "Why not?" As in, why not finish installing the trim, painting the walls and trim, buying and hanging artwork, accessorizing and doing a bunch of little Christmas diys in one short week? Good thinking, right? My husband would definitely not have made that choice. But I kindly made the decision for both of us. So we put up our wallpaper feature wall on Friday night and we worked all through the weekend. Despite my sore muscles, I'm really glad we did! I have to say I truly love our new foyer space.

We have been working on our foyer makeover for the past few weeks during evenings and weekends. You can see the "before" pics in this previous post. As I said then, we were looking for a cleaner, more sophisticated look in our large entryway. Considering the foyer is the first space you see when you enter the haven of your home, shouldn't it be a space that makes you feel good?

We have lived in our current home for 9 years. When we moved here, the kids were 3 and 5, still just little tikes really. We moved from a decent-sized, semi-detached house to a bigger, detached home with plenty of space and storage. (And then we proceeded to fill that storage up, but that's a story for another day.) Over the next couple of years, we installed hardwood flooring throughout the main level and we painted most of the rooms. (The previous homeowners liked clay and ochre colours. We were going for something lighter and brighter.)

We had a few home projects on our summer to-do list this year, but the first priority was giving our little girl's bedroom a mini makeover. Primarily we wanted to give it a fresh coat of paint. The pink colour on her walls (pictured above) had been there since before we moved in about six years ago.

As an added bonus, painting her room would allow us to take down some of the many pictures and decals that have accumulated on her walls. It was time for Bieber to go! I was also hoping that sprucing up her bedroom might encourage my little gal to keep her room tidier. Let's just say that clutter has occasionally been an issue in the past.