So generally in our house, it goes like this: I come up with a crazy renovation idea.  The Hubs sighs and/or thinks it’s awesome.  Then he, being an engineer, gets straight to the logic and maths and facts and all the other things that take up too much time and could be skipped that will make the ideas actually functional.

So, we sit down and brainstorm and sketch together, and then we get to work.  He leads in building the structures and foundations (like framing, drywalling, demo, electrical, plumbing, etc.) and I assist.  Then when he’s at work the next day (or over following months), I plan and carry out the finishes like trim, moulding, painting, etc.

This latest project was no different.

Behold, our DIY sliding-door butler’s pantry:

Yes, you’re right, it’s not a butler’s pantry at all, it just sound fancy, so that’s what I call it.  It’s just a closet/pantry/built-in china cabinet in the dining room.

So, if you remember, from once upon a time when I blogged: our dining room is huge in scale compared to the rest of the house.  In the 1890s when the house was built, it was the combo kitchen and dining room.

We didn’t need that much room and it was pretty out-of-balance for this small house.

One thing I love about the new pantry is that we made it level with the weird fridge box that’s in the middle of the kitchen.  So now the fridge box doesn’t look as strange!

If you remember, there was just a wall there before where we put our china cabinet and buffet:

So for the technicalities:

• We framed it out, just like you would do any wall. 
• The Hubs procured kits for installing sliding closet doors, along with 8 foot pieces of high-quality plywood to trim down to size for each door. 
• We hung a shelving system similar to this (affiliate link) and employed our old trick of using stair treads as shelves because they’re more substantial, and just prettier.

He cut the doors to fit, and then I trimmed them with cedar planks we had leftover from another project. I used wood glue and a brad nailer. Then caulked all the seams and primed and painted. 

The side panel was drywalled and mudded. Then everything was painted the same blue as the walls. 

And inside:

I’ve been taking updated photos of the house as we’re finishing up ALL of our unfinished projects.  (Literally, our list of work left for the house is officially down to 33 small items.)  So expect more updates in the coming weeks.

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I hadn’t realized how much the house had changed since the blog was last updated.  I took new photographs of several rooms a few weeks ago, before my family came to visit.  Like the last time they came, dad helped a lot with those little projects that usually take me forever.

Here is what our dining room looked like a few weeks ago:

Since then, dad installed all the baseboards, caps, shoe mouldings, and transition pieces for us.  There are still a lot of things I want to change in here.  (The curtains and lights weren’t supposed to be bright white, and we’re ready for a new light fixture, real crown moulding, etc…)

But last night, things changed a lot in the dining room, because we started a project I’ve been thinking about for a couple years.  It’s not really one we need, but it will be handy.  More importantly to us right now, it should help the resale value of the house when we ever get to sell it.

This wall is now a construction zone and looks nothing like this.  I’ll post an update soon, along with posts about what the rest of the house currently looks like.

See the update here (it’s pretty cool–one of our favorite DIYs yet).

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The previous vinyl flooring was light-colored and shiny…exactly the opposite of this floor, so once this hardwood was exposed, a lot more of the light was absorbed than before.  So we’re going to need to add more lighting (the lighting should be layered anyway).

I don’t plan on staining it.  I love the raw, grayed color, so we’re just going to clean it up and seal it with a matte-finish sealer.

This shag rug used to be in the living room…yes it seems crazy to have a white shag rug in a dining room.  We mostly use the dining table as a desk and eat at the kitchen table since there are only two of us.  I think we might have eaten over this rug more when it was in the living room than we have since it’s been in the dining room.

The wingback chairs are new too (a Craigslist score).  They are only in here temporarily, as soon as our new sofa comes in (it’s been ordered!), they will go across from it in the living room.

We do have one square of plywood where there used to be a floor grate (under the buffet).  Unfortunately, the original floor grates were thrown away before we purchased the house, and they are VERY expensive to replace.  (I showed a picture of the plywood square we had in the living room.  To fill that one, we took the hardwood from the stair landing–that was done when we turned the landing into hidden storage.)  This one…we aren’t sure what to do with yet.  Any ideas?

To-dos left for the dining room:

• Sand, touch up and seal floor
• Replace plywood square
• Add more lighting
• Buy dining chairs
• Buy a new buffet (?)
• Add larger crown moulding to match the living room
• Add baseboard to 2 walls
• Oh, and one more giant project that I can’t tell you about yet…

The post Dining room update appeared first on Little Victorian.

We were prepared for our dining room floor to be in pretty bad condition under all the layers of plywood and MDF.  But they’re not!  The final layer was NOT glued down, like it was in other rooms.

To give you an idea of what we were prepared for, here is what our living room floor looked like when we uncovered it 4 years ago:

Big, ugly plywood squares and layers and layers of paint, varnish, and drops of drywall mud.  So we were very happily surprised to find that our dining room floor looked like this:

See all the nail holes?  Pulling all those out was not fun.  But, after several days of walking on the floors, the holes are getting less noticeable, which is what we were hoping for.  It is funny when the basement light is on at night though, it looks like you’re standing on a starry sky.

There’s just a little bit of stain and varnish around the edges of the room, but I’ll just sand it down with my hand-held sander.  It’s nothing like what was in the living room.

We still have a little bit of the last layer to pull up, and then I’ll show you the whole room.

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Work on the bedroom has continued, but it’s not pretty work (caulking, caulking, caulking, mudding, caulking).  In the mean time, we actually had a full day to work on a project, and the Hubs chose a surprise one.

Since selling practically 1/3 of our furniture, the dining room was left like this:

The project the Hubs chose? Exposing the original hardwood in the dining room.  I was giddy.  On top of the amazing 130-year-old floors (the same we unearthed in the living room, office, hallway and bedroom), were 3 layers of plywood and one layer of vinyl wood-look planks.  Unfortunately, we only got through two layers before our bodies just quit.  It was exhausting and I haven’t been this sore–from neck to ankles–in years.

As usual, the previous remodeler used about 20 nails per square foot to fasten things things down.  We got about 3/4s of them up, so the next 2 layers should be easy-peasy.  As long as he also didn’t use Liquid Nails to glue the plywood onto the original hardwood–which he was prone to do.

We shall see as soon as we recover and have the strength to pull up the next 2 layers.

The post We’re floorless appeared first on Little Victorian.

Why would anyone paint a room with little natural light a dark color?  It seems weird.  And weird wouldn’t necessarily be out of character in this household.  But there is logic behind it!

Last week we painted our dining room dark blue.  The room is stuck in the middle of the floorplan, and doesn’t get much natural light, though it’s surrounded by rooms that are flooded with it.

Last week, the dining room was still the same semi-gloss light yellow that it was when we bought the house.  The color, in itself, wasn’t bad, but here, it was really dreary.  See all the shadows in the “before” pictures that just make the room look drab?  The light color made it obvious that there was no natural light.  While the shadows on the dark walls just seem to add depth and richness.  So many shadows in a light painted room can make it feel cold, while shadows in a dark painted room make it feel warm.

The dark walls have done two things for our room:

1. They give the room definition and clear boundaries and that makes it feel inviting and cozy.

This dining room has doorways in every direction (and the silly half-wall), which make it feel more like a hallway than a room.  But now that it’s painted in such a contrasting color from the other rooms, you can clearly see where the room begins and ends, which is another thing that gives it the warm, intimate feeling.

2. You no longer notice the lack of natural light.  Before, it was all I noticed, it felt like a cave, now it feels like an old fashioned library where you could curl up with a book and stay day.

Much like when driving and your lane is always the slowest, it seems to defy logic that a room without much natural light would feel drab when painted a light color.  It also seems to defy logic that a dark color would make it inviting and make you not realize there wasn’t much natural light.  It seems weird, but it works!  Would you ever try it?

The post Why dark walls look good in a room with little natural light appeared first on Little Victorian.

So, I painted the dining room.  It was completely unexpected and completely out of order.

Tuesday, while I was working on the basement, I went over our over-stuffed paint shelf again.  We had already gotten rid of all of the “oops” paint and the random quarts and gallons.  There was still one quart that wasn’t being used though.  It was Martha Stewart’s Mariner (dark-ish gray blue) that had been purchased to paint the windows, but it was just wasn’t quite dark enough so I went with a different color, and this quart was still full on the shelf.

At the same time (about a year ago), a paint chip of the same color had been taped to the dining room wall for 6 months.  I had really liked it at first, then I didn’t at all, especially after painting the window frame in that color…it just didn’t do it for me.  So I tossed the paint chip, and recently decided on a medium gray for the dining room walls.

Back to Tuesday, the quart of Mariner was staring me down.  I had no plans for it, so with our new “simplify” mindset, I couldn’t justify keeping it, but I really hated to get rid of it.  So I painted a swatch of it on the dining room wall…the dining room was about to be painted anyway, so if we didn’t like it, we’d just paint over it.  If we did like it, though, the quart wouldn’t be wasted.

Obviously, we both liked the swatch on the wall.  We decided to test it out to see how it looked on the half-wall.  Then when we liked it even more, so we kept painting and finished off the quart.  Wednesday, I purchased a gallon and painted the whole room.  Yesterday, I finished the second coat.

And now we have a very dark dining room.

Our dining room gets very little natural light, so painting it such a dark color is pretty controversial.  I will give you my thoughts on that design logic next week.  In the mean time, we have a very dark dining room, which is pretty exciting for a design fanatic like me.

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When I was writing the post last week about the basement hallway, I noticed something: there was a stack of drywall behind the basement door.  The same stack of drywall that was in a picture from a year ago.  (The drywall was the main reason I never shared current photos of our dining room.)

That led me to look around at the rest of the room, and it wasn’t pretty.  The buffet is our staging area for things we want to get rid of in our simplifying efforts.  You know how it is when you have one pile of stuff in a room though…more stuff gets piled in.  Like Martha says “Tidiness begets tidiness,” messiness begets messiness too.  Everything had just been there so long that we didn’t notice it anymore.  So, it got cleaned up on Friday and here is what our dining room currently looks like:

Meh.  All that furniture looked great in our last house, which was a big, contemporary, open-floor-plan house.  Not so much here in the Victorian.  So now that all the extra stuff is cleared out, I want to take everything out and start from scratch.  Starting with warm gray walls and big crown moulding to match the living room.  Something like this maybe:

Greyson Fixed Dining Table | Custom built-ins | Settee
Nouveau Paisley Napkins, Set of 4 
Natural Jaya Canvas Curtain | Van Gogh Print
Peacock Paige Round Back Dining Chairs, Set of 2

(Oh, and while I was taking photos of the dining room, I finally took some better photos of our DIY chandelier and updated the dreadful pictures from one of my very first posts.)

The post Our dining room, at the moment appeared first on Little Victorian.

When you walk into our house, you enter into the living room.  If you look straight ahead, you are facing the dining room, and the kitchen beyond that. This is what it looks like:

Is it a half-wall or just a wall with a hole in it?  A pass-through?  I’ve never liked this wall. It’s just silly to me.  Don’t get me wrong, a simple pass-through like this wouldn’t be bad in a contemporary house.  But this isn’t a contemporary house, it’s a Victorian.

While painting, I decided to remove the piece of wood in the half wall that had bothered me since we moved in.  The wood doesn’t look so bad from this angle, but it was very worn (not in a good way), ill-fitted and very, very orange.  It was also too narrow to use as a buffet, but deep enough to collect piles of papers and things all the time.

It was very easy, there were no fasteners keeping it in place, just 5 layers of paint.  So it just took some scraping with a flat head screwdriver, and a mallet.  Once it was free from the paint, the whole piece of wood just lifted right up.

I am kicking myself for living with it there for 3+ years.  It’s gone now, and it looks better, but the wall is still silly.  I don’t know how to make it not silly.  I’m thinking of possibly building in a buffet on the dining room side and adding moulding to make them look more like pillars, but that’s a big job.  Any ideas?

The post Silly half wall appeared first on Little Victorian.

Our real dining room is finally starting to come together.  I still need to replace the bench with a settee on one side of the dining table, but I finally got curtains, (almost) finished the chairs and replaced the lighting.

When we moved in, we had an icky (and way too small) brass and yellow glass chandelier.  I removed the globes and painted it black a few days after moving in to tide me over until I found a new one.  We finally replaced it with a DIY light last week.

I wish the pictures did it justice.  They don’t.  It’s feminine, but not as feminine as it looks in photos.  It looks like a giant snowball in person, and it adds so much fantastic texture to the room.  But then when you turn it on, not only does it still light up the room, it looks like a glowing star.  I don’t think we’ve had a single person (even guys!) visit that haven’t stared and asked about it (and even asked me to make them one).

It’s a super easy, very cheap DIY.  It takes time, but you will NOT regret it.

You’ll need:

A round paper shade (ours is 24 inches)
A cord set (or a $5 one from IKEA)
Coffee filters (about 350)
Glue gun & many sticks of hot glue (here’s a good one!)

(Affiliate links above)

We already had the shade and cord, but to buy them new from IKEA is only $9.  It takes about 350 coffee filters (I underestimated and had to go back to the store twice–when it looks like you only need about 50 more, you probably need over 100), and those cost less than $4.

It’s one of the easiest projects ever.

The shade gets heavy where you put the coffee filters, and will try to roll away as you’re working, so to get it to hold still, I made a base from a towel.  Just roll one up and then form a circle with it, then put your lantern on top. (See above picture.)

The cord set is made for plugging in, but to hardwire it (if you’re comfortable with electricity), just cut the plug off, and pull the wires apart–at that point, it will be exactly like replacing a hardwired light. (Update: I made a tutorial of turning a plug-in light into a hard-wired light.) If you don’t want to hardwire it, the cord set comes with hooks so you can plug it into a socket and hang it from anywhere.

It really doesn’t look orange at all when it is on, it just shows up that way in photos.  I’ll get this photography thing figured out someday.

If you don’t already already have the supplies, this project would cost about $14 and take about 3 hours.  I totally recommend it.

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