Painting the Dining Room

It was too hot to do anything today. The house has been relatively cool on warmer days so far this summer, but today broke a bunch of heat and humidity records, and even the house couldn't account for that.. But I just couldn't let a day go by without any work getting done! So I decided to paint the Dining Room.

The Dining Room is probably the one room in the house that could have waited until the very end to be refinished. While in the future it will be a room we will use a lot for family dinners, holidays and get togethers, for now, we can eat in the Kitchen or Living Room. And we aren't planning on hosting holidays until we have kids. Yet it's the one room that is almost complete. Ironic. Also ironic is that it is the only paint color I've been able to choose so far. Every other room I flip through my color books, unable to find anything that would maybe work. But this room, I opened the book to a random page, and said "wow.. that's it!". The color is Benjamin Moore Pewter. Because we're newlywed first time homeowners, we don't have money to buy Benjamin Moore paint, as much as we'd like to. We have to buy whatever Lowe's or Home Depot has on sale that week. And this week it was Behr, so we had them color match it. It came out pretty close, but not exact. It's a little bluer than the BM color, but that's ok because I think it looks great! We decided to not paint the trim. There's so much of it, and it was in pretty good condition. Nothing peeling, no spots that needed touching up. 

Luckily there wasn't a lot to be painted. I say lucky because I stepped into the other room to make a phone call, only to hear Ryan yelling a couple minutes later. Turns out he was trying to help and do some second coat touch-ups, and accidentally bumped the paint can (which had the cover on, but wasn't closed) and it spilled EVERYWHERE. I mean everywhere! About 3/4 of a gallon of paint was now not in the paint can anymore. Luckily we had left the carpet in there while we were painting and it all spilled on the carpet. It missed the wood floor by about an inch. We were very very lucky!

Many people say that the Dining Room is their favorite room in our house. Due to the size of the fireplace, I originally thought it might have been the original Kitchen. And it was very common for this room, in this floor plan, to be a Kitchen. But in the style of the Wilcoxes, it is very intricately detailed. Too much so for a Kitchen, even in a Wilcox house. I think it may have been the original Sitting/Receiving Room (Living Room). It has crown molding and wood paneling that run around the room, and a fireplace with a very interesting mantle detail. Oh, and a funeral door.