Presto Change-o! or Weird Deja Vu?

Continuing the dining room update:

Thursday I put on two coats of varnish, sanding between coats




I finished the last coat on Friday morning and knew we'd have to really hustle to get the room finished before going back to work on Monday. We had talked about two possible colors, both from the Sherwin Williams Arts & Crafts palette: "Portrait Tone" and "Roycroft Adobe." I got samples and painted 2 x2 foot squares of each around the room. Everyone's first choice except youngest daughter's was Adobe. Even the neighbors concur, and they have to look at our dining room at night when they are in their kitchen. Saturday night I primed everything and then started in on color Sunday morning








I was leery of using a red paint and wondering if I'd need extra coats to get it to conver evenly, but it went on easily. Even though it is an S-W color I still went to my Mautz paint store (they are owned by S-W now) and by using the best Mautz brand, and since I have an account with them, I also get a discount, so I got a much better price.




I think we did a great job of covering the spot where we had torn out plaster. I ended up using a texture product that I added to the primer to get the same bumps as the original plaster had. Compare this picture below with the third one from the top in this post to see what I'm talking about.


At our old house we had Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper border in our living room and dining room, we will use the same pattern here. At the old place we used the "Prairie" border in the "Natural" color family. Here at Foxcroft we will use a ligher color family "Thatch." You'd think we picked the wall coler with the border in mind, but I didn't dig up the sample until after everyone picked Adobe.


I'd finished the second coat by noon and then late this afternoon I started moving furniture back in and haning pictures back up.




So after not having a dining room for a week, we celebrated with our corn beef and cabbage dinner a day late.


After I took this picture I was reminded of a March dinner we hosted at our old house 6 years ago. The photo below was taken by our by our now next door neighbor, before we had hatched up any of this moving stuff. You can just barely see the border paper at the top of the dining room. And while we left those curtains behind we bought another set just like them, which are in our dining room again. We certainly like what we like!