Acre House Dining Room

The kitchen in this house opens up to the family room, but the dining room is completely separate.  My first thought when we saw this home was that we should tear down a wall or two to open it all up.  Then, within minutes, I completely changed my mind.  I know separate dining rooms are not what is "all the rage" right now.  However, separate dining rooms have their perks.  

Perk # 1:  No distractions.  No one is watching tv while eating and everyone can just focus on the food and each other.  I like that.  A lot, actually.  It simplifies meal time and I feel more connected to my family.

Perk # 2:  We can't see the kitchen.  I'm more relaxed when I sit down and eat with my family and I can't see the dirty dishes from meal prep, strewn across the counter tops and filling up the sink.

I know separate dining rooms aren't for everyone, but if you have one... enjoy it.

Above is the picture taken by someone within the realty company before we bought our house.  Great structure.  Love the archway going into the living room and I love the big window.  The cons for us were carpet in the dining room (I guess we're messy people) and the paint color and light fixture were dated and not my style.  

Here's another shot of the room from a different angle, about two days after we moved in.

This is the dining room today.

I know the quality of the picture above is horrible, but it's the only one I have, at the moment, of the whole room.  

These are the changes we've made so far:  

New laminate flooring (flowing into the other main living areas too), new paint, and new light fixture.  

There are a couple of things we still need to do in here.

We still need to finish the base molding and I'd really like a longer dining room table.  My husband and I saw a dreamy one at Costco yesterday.  It came with chairs and everything.  It was a fabulous deal, totally on sale, but when you haven't saved up for a new dining room table yet, a fabulous deal is still too much money.  Ugh!  It's hard to walk away from something you totally love when the funds aren't there.  But we did the mature thing and walked away. :(

On the Opposite wall of the window, we have this old dresser that we've had forever.  It holds some entertaining decor and other odds and ends.  I love that the top of it can serve as kind of a buffet table during big holiday dinners or other special occasions too. 

I bought this green metal container from a lovely gal on instagram.  It holds extra napkins and multiplication cards, which I know is random.  However, my youngest is in third grade and is learning multiplication in math this year.  Having these flash cards out and easy to access, makes memorizing all those facts a little easier, when all we have to do is sit at the dining room table and grab a few to memorize every day.  I'm all about making a space pretty, but even more importantly, functional and usable for my family.  This metal container is one of those pretty + useful pieces of home decor, which are my favorite kind.

While our current dining room table is feeling smaller and appears more dinged up, as the years press on,  I'm still trying to make the best of it.  I decorated the top of it with a scrap of black and white gingham material, some layered wood slices (from some trees around our property we had to cut down), and some white battery operated candles. 

Here's another angle of the dining room from the open kitchen/family room area.

Last weekend, I finally hung some framed pictures on either side of the arched doorway.  It's so nice to see them on the wall and not just stacked somewhere collecting dust (like they had been for the last six months).

Each picture holds a memory that has become a little conversation starter as we eat dinner.  I'd highly recommend hanging a gallery of family pictures somewhere near your dinner table.  :)  Most of the framed pictures are not fancy.  Half of them are printed from pictures I took on my phone.  It's awesome being able to see them in print everyday!

Last picture.  I know the quality is bad, but I love that big sign on top of the dresser, "gather."  It describes the whole meaning and everything that I love about this room.

Acre House Entryway Before + After

I really came to love the split level home we fixed up before we moved here.  However, I was never very fond of it's entryway.  It was tiny and felt very awkward when letting visitors in.  One of the many pluses to this rambler is that we can invite people in with room to spare.  While this space may seem very common to some, the openness of this entry feels like a new luxury to me.

The existing flooring was made up of newer carpet and linoleum.   I know it totally looks like wood or laminate in the picture, but it's not.  The variety of flooring this house had, made it feel choppy to us.  So within the first few months, we tore out all of the flooring in the main living areas.  We replaced it with a water proof laminate found at Home Depot.  A couple of the other things we did right away in this area, was new paint (Dolphin Fin by Behr - still a favorite of mine) and we replaced the entry light fixture.

After fresh paint, new flooring, and a new light, my husband installed pine tongue and groove planking just to this one wall here. 

Okay, so this is real life when you're moving in and renovating at the same time.  It's a beautiful mess, but it's real.  I loved how the planking turned out.  So pretty.  I ALMOST considered leaving it raw and unpainted.  But I'm a white and gray decor kind of girl, so the final decision was to paint it white.

 Here we are today.  All moved in and this space now feels more "us".

Here's another glance from a slightly different angle.  Sorry for the blurry picture.  I got a new camera for Christmas and I'm still struggling with how to use it.  Sometimes what looks like a crisp picture to my eye when I'm taking the picture, isn't really so crisp.  I've got some learning to do. :)

I reused these hooks that used to hang in the entry in our old house.  They are the perfect combination of nice to look at and useful.  Lately I've been learning something about myself and decor.  If it can be BOTH pretty and functional, I love it!  Sometimes I have a hard time buying things that are just for looks. Not that I never do, but I like the simplicity of pretty + useful.

 

I recently purchased this jute rug from Rugs USA.  I love jute rugs for the entry because they can take a beating and this area gets a lot of traffic.  My husband built the bench out of some old wood we had and some industrial metal legs I bought on Amazon.  Another tiny update to this area was some paint on the front door.  I painted it black, but this section of the house doesn't get a lot of natural light.  So I may need to rethink the black and go with something a shade or two lighter.  We'll see.

 Hello!

I tried to be intentional with the things I hung on the walls in here.  We go in and out the front door several times a day.  The first things you see when coming in are a picture of Christ, a picture of the Prophet (Thomas S. Monson - President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and one of our favorite quotes from the Prophet. "May we ever choose the harder right, instead of the easier wrong."

 

I also placed a small clip board in the window sill, next to the front door.  I can clip different scriptures here throughout the year that we are trying to learn or memorize.

The last thing I hung in the entry was this oval mirror.  Just in case we want to glance at ourselves before we head out for the day.  This mirror has some sentimental value.  It used to be bright yellow and hang in my room when I was a baby.  It made it's way into my younger sister's room when I was growing up too and then finally landed in my lap again.

This house has really good bones.  We've only made changes to it that made it feel more like "us" rather than the previous owners.

Next week I'll try to share some updates we made to the family room.  Until then, have a good day and stay warm!  Our winter, so far this year, has been brutally cold!

Our Split Level Fixer Upper

*Page in Progress

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Welcome to our home! 

I post updates on our fixer upper all the time around here, but I thought it was high time that I group all of the before and after pictures of our home's progress in one spot.

So here we go:

Our fixer-upper is a classic nineteen-seventies split level.

We bought it in the summer of 2009 and have been slowly wittling away at fixing it up ever since.

I don't think a single room is completely finished.  But we do have plenty of retro "before" pictures of each room and some pictures of each room as they are "now" to share with you. 

Take a look...

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The Stairway 

Before:

 Now: 

The Living Room

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Kitchen/Living Room Wall

Before:

Now:

 The Kitchen 

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The Dining Room 
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The Upstairs Hall Closet 
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 Now:

Hallway
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Now:

Main Bathroom

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Master Bedroom 

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Master Bathroom 

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Bedroom Number Two 

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Bedroom Number Three 

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 The Basement 

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 Now:

 

Guest Bedroom
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Laundry Room
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