We finally got our new couch and a couple of new chairs for our living room delivered yesterday!  Here’s a picture of them:

Our New Furniture

We think the new furniture looks a lot nicer in the living room than our old couch did, and it’s pretty comfortable too.  The only thing we’re really noticing is how out-of-place all the rest of the furniture in the room looks now that we have the new pieces.  I can’t wait to see how it will look with the new, less-orange, tables when they get delivered tomorrow!

We’re so excited to finally have a couple of furniture deliveries scheduled this week for items we’ve ordered over the last few months.  We have a new sofa and a couple of upholstered chairs coming on Wednesday … and a new coffee table and credenza (for behind the sofa) being delivered on Friday.

The Furniture Being Delivered This Week!!

After this, we’re still waiting for the leather chair and ottoman that’s likely to not be in until next Spring (ug!), a couple more tables that are expected to be in next week, a dining room set that’s supposed to be here just before Christmas, and a couple more upholstered chairs should come the week after Christmas.  We’re so excited to see the new furniture in our house – I hope it looks as good in our house as it did in the stores!!

We ordered some new furniture for our living room back on September 19th.  At the time, they told us that the fabric pieces we ordered would take 60-90 days to come in and the leather chair and ottoman would probably be more like 90-120 days.  Since it had been almost 2 months, I called yesterday to ask about the status of our order and see if they could give me some firmer dates for when our furniture would be in.  Turns out the fabric furniture is in the local warehouse already, but the leather stuff (which wasn’t considered custom) has been back-ordered and probably won’t be in until the end of February or beginning of March – almost 6 months after we ordered it!

Because it’s going to be so long before we’d get the leather furniture, they’re giving us the option to take the same chair and ottoman in a lighter brown color.  They have the chair in the lighter color in the local warehouse already, but we’d still have to order the ottoman and that would still take until the end of February to come in, so I’m not sure we’ve gained much.

Even for the fabric furniture, which is already here (actually a little ahead of schedule), it sounds like it will be a couple weeks before it will be delivered … and that’s if I go in tomorrow to pay the balance for that furniture.  Once I pay for the rest of it, they said they’d release the order to the warehouse.  Then, within 3-5 business days, I should expect to receive a phone call from the warehouse manager who will schedule delivery sometime in the following 5-10 business days.  That means there’s still a chance we won’t have the furniture before Thanksgiving … and it’s probably no more than 10 miles from our house right now!  Insane!

I think the thing that bothers me the most about the whole thing is that every other industry is working to become more efficient and speed up their manufacturing and delivery time – except for the furniture industry.  It doesn’t seem to matter where you order it from or how custom it is – it just takes forever … and even when the furniture comes in, it’s likely to have something wrong with it.

We’re still deciding what to do about the leather chair & ottoman that won’t be in until February/March.  Even if we cancel the order and go find something we like at another furniture store, we’re starting the process all over again – and it might still be February before we actually get the furniture …  Ug.

After being in our house for about 2 years and having basically no furniture in our living room during that time, we finally decided it was time to start furniture shopping.

Our living room is pretty large (about 30′ long x 16′ wide), but really long and narrow with lots of doorways that make furniture placement a challenge, so I started by putting together a floorplan for the room to have a better idea of the size and scale of furniture that would work in the space.  Here’s the plan I came up with:

Floor Plan for Living Room

We’ll have a small, apartment-size sofa (about 78″ in length) and a pair of chairs in front of the fireplace with a coffee table in the middle and a sofa table behind the couch for lamps and a little additional storage.  Since the room is so narrow and there are doors on either side of the fireplace that require us to leave a couple of paths through the room, we had to pick some smaller pieces for this conversation area.  On the right side of the diagram (the front of the house), we’ll have a chair and ottoman in front of the built in display cabinets to add some additional seating and we’re planning to move the piano to this half of the room as well where it will fit better along the wall common with the family room.  On the left side of the diagram (back of the house), we’re thinking of having a standard height table large enough for playing board games or reading a newspaper, with a couple of upholstered chairs that will be easy to reposition around the table.  We’re also thinking of having some taller bookshelves / display cabinets to help balance out the built ins on the other side of the room.

We already had the piano, but all of the other pieces in the floor plan are things we needed to shop for, so we started looking around at the local furniture stores a month or so ago and we finally decided on some upholstered furniture that we thought would be the right size/scale for the room.  Here are some pictures of the pieces we bought:

New Furniture for Living Room

The new apartment-size sofa (upper left) will be covered in a brown linen fabric that’s a little darker in person than it looks in the picture.  The matching chairs (upper right) will be covered in a coordinating textured fabric that’s a blend of tan and ivory.  We also purchased a dark brown leather chair and ottoman that will go in front of the display cases and some coordinating pillows in the fabric on the lower left.

Everything we bought is pretty neutral, but I think it will look nice in our living room once it finally comes in.  We were really hopeful that we would have the furniture before Christmas, maybe even in time to have a Christmas party now that we’ll have places for people to sit, but it sounds like it will be a good 60-90 days before we should expect to receive the new furniture, so we might be lucky to have it by Christmas.  We’re still working to pick out some coordinating tables and a couple more chairs.  Hopefully we can get those on order soon as well!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working to paint the dining room (finally!)  It’s taken a lot longer than I expected, but I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

New Dining Room Paint

I love the color gray we finally decided on for above the chair rail.  It’s Sherwin Williams Pavestone (SW7642).  I was a little worried to start with that it would come off as too blue or too tan, but it definitely looks gray without being too dark or too stark against the white.  The bottom half of the room is Sherwin Willams Modest White (SW6084), which is the same as the trim color in the rest of the house.

I started by priming all of the freshly plastered walls with a tinted Loxon primer that’s meant for concrete block walls.  At first, I thought this was overkill considering that the walls were only skim coated, but we’ve since had a problem with paint peeling off of the walls in the foyer because they weren’t primed properly, so we’re hoping this will prevent the same problem in the dining room.  The biggest challenge with the Loxon primer was that we hadn’t planned on using a different primer for the walls than for the new wood trim pieces for the picture frame molding, so I would up having to cut in around all of the trim , which was pretty time consuming.

After the primer was dry, I’ve put one layer of top coat on all of the walls.  The gray part above the chair rail is a low-sheen eg shel finish.  I really like how deep the color looks without being shiny.  One coat on top of the tinted primer gave us really consistent color and finish, so I think I’m done painting above the chair rail.  For the portion below the chair rail, we decided to paint it in a semi-gloss enamel like all the rest of the woodwork in the house.  One coat looks good color wise, but I’m still deciding if I want to put another coat on to try to even out the finish.  I’m not sure if it’s anything anyone but me will ever notice, but I’m afraid it’ll drive me nuts if I know it’s not perfect and I don’t fix it.

I can’t wait to finally be done with all of the painting, get the light fixtures and outlet covers back up, and move the furniture back in.  I think it’s going to be a huge improvement over the old wallpaper!

With the plaster work done, we started installing picture frame molding below the chair rail in the dining room yesterday.  We’re only about half way done, but I really like how it looks so far:

Picture Frame Molding in the Dining Room

We were initially a little uncertain of the scale and dimensions to use since our chair rail is uncommonly low.  Given the dimensions of the room, though, we finally decided it would be best to do a smaller number of long, skinny boxes rather than a bunch of square ones and we decided to use 1″ trim pieces.  The measurements we decided on were a 2″ gap between the bottom of the chair rail and the top of the picture frame molding, a 2″ gap from the top of the baseboard and the bottom of the picture frame molding, and 4″ gaps on the sides and/or between boxes.

We were also a little concerned about how to attach the molding to the wall.  We were concerned that the nail gun would cause the plaster to crack and thought we might have to screw the molding to the walls instead, which would be a lot more time consuming.  We tested a spot in the kitchen closet and there were no signs of cracking, so we decided to go ahead and use it in the dining room and we haven’t had any problems so far.  For good measure, we also decided to use construction adhesive to make up for the places where the walls were a little wavy or there wasn’t an appropriately located stud to nail into.  So far, the installation is going pretty well.

We still need to do some sanding to knock the edges off of the the trim pieces before we paint and we probably need to put some caulk along the edges of the molding to fill in some small gaps between the trim and the wall and then I think we’ll be ready to paint.  I’m excited to see what the room will look like once all of the molding is the same color.

After we took the wallpaper down in our dining room, the walls looked pretty good, but there were a few holes and cracks and a couple of places where the plaster was separating from the lathe.  We hired a plasterer who had done some work in our house before for the previous owners to clean them up a little.

The plasterer originally planned to screw the plaster back into the lathe in the places where it had started to separate, then patch the holes and cracks and touch up any other imperfections in the wall without doing a full skim-coat.  Once he started working on it, though, he decided the walls were in worse shape than he’d originally estimated and he wound up removing the plaster down to the lathe in a couple of the worse spots and then skim coating the whole room.

One place where the plaster was removed from the dining room walls.

By the time the plasterer finished, the entire house was covered in a thick layer of plaster dust, but the dining room walls looked perfect.  When the plasterer left, there were still a couple sections that were pretty wet and we’ll need to do a little sanding to blend them in with the rest of the wall now that they’re dry.  Besides that, though, the new plaster is perfectly smooth and ready to be painted!

A new patch of plaster that's not quite dry yet

The skim-coated walls

Our dining room project is no where near done, but when it is, we’ll have at least one picture to hang on the wall!

New Artwork for the Dining Room.

I’m really challenged when it comes to picking out artwork for our house, which is why we have only about a half a dozen pictures on the wall in the whole house, so I was really excited to find this one when I was shopping the other day.  I think it’s the perfect size to hang above our buffet (which has been temporarily relocated to the living room) once we get our dining room painted and put back together … and I think the colors will go nicely with the new gray paint color we’ve picked for the dining room as well as the colors in the rest of the house.  I’m not completely sold on the metallic frame (I’d rather it had a nice wood one), but for as cheap as it was, I really can’t complain!

We took the wallpaper down in the dining room over the weekend and now I’m trying to pick a paint color for the walls.  I’m really struggling with it because the colors look so different on the walls than they do on little paint samples.  We think we’d like to paint the room gray, but I’m having trouble picking the right shade.

Here’s a few of the colors we’re thinking about:

Paint Samples for the Dining Room

The one on the far left is Sherwin Williams Classic French Gray (SW0077).  It’s about as true of a gray as you can get with virtually no undertones of any other color in it, but I’m afraid it’s kind of dark and might be too stark against all of the other colors in our house, which are various shades of beige and brown.  The color in the middle is Sherwin Williams Mega Greige (SW7031).  It has a lot more brown in it, which I think will make it blend better with the rest of our house, but I’m afraid that the color would read brown instead of gray once it’s painted on all of the walls.  The color on the right is Sherwin Williams Pavestone (SW7642), which has slightly more gray in it than the Mega Greige sample, but I can’t decide if it also looks sort of blueish.

Our plan right now is to put picture moldings on the bottom half of the wall and paint everything below the chair rail the same color that the trim is in this picture.  We’re also thinking about extending the paneling that’s on the front of the window seat around the window and up to the crown molding.  If we do that, we’ll probably also paint that the trim color.  Whatever we pick for above the chair rail we’d probably do in a low sheen finish so it wouldn’t have the reflection the paint samples have now, but that will probably make it feel like it absorbs more of the light in the room too.

Window Seat in Dining Room

Any thoughts on which of these samples would be the best choice?  Or are there other shades of gray that might be better?

We’ve been talking about taking down the wallpaper in our dining room since the first time we walked through this house with our real estate agent.  I’ve been struggling with the decision of what to do with the walls after we remove the wallpaper, so we’ve been living with it for the last couple of years while I tried to make up my mind.  This weekend, though, we decided it was time for the wallpaper to go so we can get started on the project to update the dining room.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that the wallpaper in this room came down just as easily as the coordinating wallpaper in the sunroom did when we removed it a year or so ago.  We didn’t have to score the wallpaper or soak it with a water & vinegar solution.  There was virtually no scraping either and there’s not much glue left on the walls.  We’re considering ourselves pretty lucky.

The Old Dining Room Wallpaper

After Removing the Wallpaper

Not sure that the dining room looks that much better now, but we’re hoping it will be a nice transformation by the time we’re done.  Our plan for the room is to have an electrician come in to replace the old knob and tube wiring to the light fixtures and then have a plasterer come in to repair the walls where there are cracks  and holes.  We also have a few places where the plaster is separating from the lath behind it, so we’re hoping the plasterer will be able to repair that as well.  Once the plaster work is done, we’re thinking about installing picture moldings below the chair rail that will be painted the same color as the trim.  Above the trim, we’re thinking of painting the walls a darker gray color, but I’m still working on finding the right shade that doesn’t look too blue or too tan (a task that’s much harder than it should be!)