Next up: Our dining room

We use our dining room every day. It’s where we eat, an office, a play area, a hallway. It’s a heavily used space (our entire first floor is), so I want to give it the attention it deserves.

It’s a casual space, but right now it’s casual bordering on boring and plain. There are a lot of hard sufaces, no pattern, no texture. The buffet, wardrobe and chandelier are staying, but the table and chairs need some work.

We’ve been using this dining set from Dan’s bachelor days. It’s really not something I would choose myself, but the scale of the table is right for the room. And it’s functional enough.

Once I made a bet with myself that we weren’t allowed to get a new table until I learned how to keep it cleared off. The table is still here, so that lesson still needs to be learned, I guess.

There’s also a number of things in the room that need repairing. We have a former return air vent that was blocked up by a previous owner of the house. There’s the register, layered on top of some brown paper and then some insulation. This is right near where Elise eats, so over the past couple of years, we’ve had grapes and craisins and beans stuck in there and it’s a horrible thing to clean. Needs a better solution.

When we moved in, we took down some ugly aluminium blinds off the windows, but I never patched the holes or re-painted the molding. The curtains hide those patches most of the time, but I’m finally going to do something about them and the rest of the chips and dings in the molding.

I’ve also never been quite happy with these curtains. I bought them shortly after we moved in, but they’re a little dull and hung too low. They are also covered in yogurt splatters. (Thanks, Elise.) Gross, I know, but I’ve been worried they would shrink if I washed them. (Any reason to fuel procrastination, right?) My plan is to raise the rod then add some fabric to lengthen the panels, so a washing and possible shrinking shouldn’t be a problem.