Dining Room/Family Room Remodel Project

Since the weather has turned to below freezing mostly at this point, Phillip has been forced to pause the work on the porch remodel project and began working on the room next to our living room. Technically, the room is a dining room, but we plan on making it into a family room since it is the only room in the house, with the exception of the bedrooms, that has a wall big enough to hold Phillip's monstrous 50" plasma TV (really, who needs a TV that big?). During the holidays, he had two weeks off and wanted to start work on this project. Even though he caught the cold that Parker and I had, he still worked almost every day on the room. Before you say anything, I didn't make him...he likes to do this stuff. I must say that I am impressed with the progress that he has made in such a short amount of time.

The first shot in each series is the "before" from when we first looked at the house and considered purchasing it. The bar is just one of the built-ins that Phillip loved about the house. You might think that there isn't really anything wrong with the room - why change it? Well, you can't tell in the photo, but in between each boxed panel on the wall is wallpaper...4 layers of it! It looked awful. We later discovered that it was also covering some major wall damage. This room needed a lot of TLC.

The window wall definitely needs the most work. Once Phillip removed the wallpaper, he found that there was a large whole where the plaster had crumbled behind the radiator under the window. He had to strip the wall to the bare bones. Unfortunately, he got the drywall up and skimmed before I was able to take a photo of how scary it looked. You can get a small idea of what it looked like though in the closest picture above...see the wood peaking out behind the drywall? The whole window wall looked like that. On a more positive note, since the wall was stripped to the bones, it gave us the opportunity to add insulation to the wall (something this house is in serious need of but would cost WAY TOO much to do if we did not need to strip all of the walls down.)

Even though the plate railing is nice, I thought it was WAY too much dark wood in one little room, making the room appear very "heavy". I wanted it to feel a lot more brighter and lively, like a young, active family actually lives here...not a traditional grandma (no offense grandparents!). Phillip removed all of the extra boxing on the walls, leaving one big wall for him to place his HUGE TV. I am planning on placing wallpaper on this wall to hopefully help camouflage the TV a little bit.

In the matter of time that it has taken me to post this (about 3 days after I took these pictures), Phillip has all ready skimmed and sanded the plaster walls, caulked and put up 2 coats of primer paint. Still, he is far from being completed. The wood still needs to be treated, painting the baseboards and the crown molding as well as the boxed ceiling. The window will also need some TLC, and we have learned that those take a lot of time. Rome wasn't built in a day.