Dining Room Updates

I tell you, this dining room is always going through changes, no matter how big or small!  I realized that I haven't properly introduced you all to the dining room since we got our new table.  I briefly mentioned it during the Thanksgiving post, but it was not followed with a tour.  Here goes!

The cute little table before:

The nice long table after (and more shots of the dining room):

 

I hope your morning is coming off to a great start!

A Day to Reminisce

We bought our house again this morning!  We decided to refinance since the rates were so low.  This was a part of our plan to cut costs, and we're excited about the results that we will soon see.

Today I decided to dedicate this post to our house and how it looked before we moved in.  These are the pictures that I took while we were house hunting.  Our house hunting ended up being a one day event.  We looked at two other houses before reaching ours.  Simon had to work that day, so my mom, sister, my agent and I did the hunting.  I showed Simon the pictures of the two houses that I liked the most, and we decided on this one :)

 Looking in from the front door

 

 The downstairs guest bedroom (the first door to the left in the image above)

The guest bathroom downstairs

 The Kitchen

View of the Kitchen and Dining Room from the Great Room (the image below is actually the house next door, but our house has the same layout.  The only differences are the backsplash, the granite color and the style of cabinet).  Oh, and my Mom, Sister and Agent are below :)

The Great Room (and my sister :) )

 The hall upstairs

Master Bedroom and Bath

The first guest bedroom upstairs (AKA my Office)

Didn't get pictures of the second guest bedroom upstairs...but...it's a room!  Oh, and the guest bath upstairs looks exactly like the one downstairs, so no point in posting it twice.

One of the things that I was most excited about, the back yard.

A lot of new homes these days do not have enough yard space, so seeing this made me smile big!  The only thing I wasn't excited about was the kudzu.

So, the top five reasons why I loved this house-

5.  As I just mentioned, a back yard that we can actually use.  Run around, build a garden, do whatever.

4.  A guest bedroom and bathroom are on the first level.

3.  The open floor plan.  I love the two story great room, it opens everything up even more.

2.  A wood burning fireplace.  Many newer homes have gas logs, but I love fires with real wood (a lower gas bill is an added bonus!).

1.  The kitchen!  All of the cabinets, the deep sinks and the counter space.   In fact, whenever I think about our home, I remember the first time I saw the kitchen.  My eyes widened and I smiled so big!  We were living in an apartment before and it was no fun trying to prepare meals on tiny counters with the two of us in there together.  For fun, here's the kitchen in our old apartment-

Excuse Simon, he was snacking on something and doing some last minute packing on moving day, lol!

Now it's your turn!  What are the things that drew you to your home and what were you so excited to see for the first time?

Dining Room Updates

November was a pretty busy month full of all sorts of DIY projects.  I'm going to cover two of them tonight.  The first is dining room no-sew curtains, and the second a little spray paint to a tray (you knew spray paint was going to be in this post somewhere, didn't ya?).

As you may know, we made LONGGG curtains for our great room earlier this year (check it out here if you haven't seen them).  It took a while and was our first time making them, so we figure we're veterans now when it comes to making smaller ones.  I went to the same fabric store from before and got the fabric for $3.99 a yard (that's the regular price of all fabric in the store!).  I found this fabric and really liked it because it would blend well with the other curtains but still have it's own personality.

I ended up making these by myself, and it only took about three hours (much better than the three days it took us to make the other ones).

Just to remind you, here are some before pictures of the Dining Room.

Shortly after moving in.

A few months after moving in.

The day before the curtains went up.

Another angle.

And this is the end result

I plan on keeping the curtains open and replacing the shades with a pair that have a thermal lining so that it will help to keep the room warm.

The second project that I completed was changing the color of the tray that our liquor bottles are on.  You may remember the tray from this post.  I had been contemplating if I wanted to keep it the jade color that it was or spray it a different color.  I decided to spray the inside gold and keep the outside jade.

I enjoy the result!

A Tale of Two Trees

As I previously mentioned, we have a larger tree this year.  We already had a cute little tree (which seems incredibly small now compared to the new tree), so of course I didn't want to part ways with it.  It's the first tree that Simon and I had together!  I decided to keep it and decorate it a different color scheme from the main tree.  Our new tree is multicolored lights with all white ornaments and the cutie tree is turquoise and lime green. (excuse the quality of some of the photos; trying to shoot in a low light setting without a tripod wasn't working so well)

I also decorated our buffet with touches of Christmas.  The tree is sitting on top of an upside down vase (I'm sure you've seen the vase in multiple pictures across this blog!).  The reindeer is an ornament, and the scarves around the bottles are wine/martini glass markers.

More link parties that I'm participating in:

1. A Thoughtful Place

2. Honey We're Home
3. Thrifty Decor Chick