Here it is in its original incarnation, looking across the dining room into it. You can just make out the orange timber floors under that layer of tracked-in mud, and who doesn't love those never-ending yellow walls!
Once we painted the walls and sanded and restained the floor, it looked like this.
And now it looks like this!
You've already met my gallery walls.
Which, incidentally, I am still completely in love with.
We've covered up the original front doorway with two Ikea Billy bookcases that we bought while we were at our last house, and we found a perfect-sized dresser on Gumtree in almost exactly the same colour, which we bought for $140. And then sold the mirror from the top for $20 on Ebay, bringing the dresser's cost down to $120.
At the moment the dresser is just sitting in front of the bookshelves, until we fill in that wall properly and mount the shelves on the wall so they can sit safely on top of the dresser. I'm also thinking about maybe painting the dresser and the shelves in the wall colour, so they look like built-ins and don't make that corner so dark.
Those black chairs you can just see sitting in front of the dresser were a $20 find on Gumtree. They were pretty darn ugly.
I unscrewed the seats...
Gave them an undercoat...
And then a few thin coats of gloss black.
I still haven't found a decent fabric to recover the seats, so this is how they must stay for the moment. They do look a lot better than they did, but I think they probably won't be a permanent fixture in the main living area. They're too...busy. Too many spindly bits. I think we need something more solid and chunky in the room.
The little table sitting between them was another $10 Gumtree find. It's destined for a change in colour sometime in the future. When I decide what colour that is!
It's quite similar in style to this other side table that I also got for $10 from the guy that I bought the bathroom mirror from.
In the corner next to that strange window with shelves in it sits my great grandmother's piano, with Louis, my ghost chair. And the mirror that was my first bathroom mirror choice.
I'm really enjoying all the little details in the room, now that I finally have the luxury of putting little pretty things around the place.
I bought that fold-out desk unit for $70 recently. It's an unpleasantly heavy thing. But great for storage! Next to is I've put an old Target basket where we're storing our cold weather rugs and blankets for couch-lounging.
Putting up those Ikea bookshelves finally gave me the opportunity to start unpacking our many many boxes of books, currently stored at my mother's house. Harry Potter holds pride of place. I didn't realise until I took this photo that my silver owl is a particularly good choice for my Harrys.
Another little detail... when I was creating the gallery walls I took part of a page from the original plans of our house (in its original incarnation), found a Youtube tutorial for turning ordinary pictures into blueprints in Gimp, and now we have a blueprint-looking version of our house plans as a reminder of what it looked like at the start!
So now, the view into the dining room that used to look like this...
Now looks like this!
Nothing's perfect yet, but it certainly feels more like a home!
No comments:
Post a Comment