Case Study: Dining Room Part 1

Our now dining room has been many things in the past, a living room, craft room and office. It is the second of our front rooms and as we use the other for sitting, we wanted a proper dining area ready for if we wanted to invite friends and family around for dinner on a whim, as it's usually a task to sort out the kitchen table to sit more than 4. The room hadn't been decorated in quite some years, since I was a child, and so a revamp was definitely in order.

We started with the usual clearing of the room, stripping wallpaper and getting the room ready. This included a little more prep than the usual room as it is an old house and the layers of paint underneath meant that the previous paper was not sticking to the wall in places. We scraped off what we could and decided to paint the walls in a watered down PVA glue mixture to seal it all. We could then begin papering and painting all the woodwork. 

The walls underneath the old paper

While the prep was going on I was looking for inspiration on what style we wanted the room to be. I had a white room in mind as the space gets lots of light and has high ceilings but is not amazingly big, so I thought the white would help open up the space and also give a great backdrop for all our trinkets that we collect - I wanted our possessions to be the focal point and not a patterned wallpaper. We decided on Wevet by Farrow & Ball for its chalky, Matt finish and it has a grey tone which I found much more appealing than a standard white emulsion which was slightly too "white", almost like someone who's teeth have been overly whitened!

We were keeping the original black fireplace, which has patterned tiles within it, but I wanted to paint the surround. I was unsure whether white would look right next to the fire and so I looked for confirmation and other options on Pinterest. Here are a few images I loved:

http://www.sfgirlbybay.com/2015/03/03/bedtime-in-brunswick/

http://residencestyle.com/contemporary-living-room-designs-ideas/2/

http://ao.com/life/home/inspiration/alcove-ideas-and-inspiration/

So with my ideas confirmed we painted the surround in Wevet too, but chose the satin finish for a little more durability. It was at this stage, when the room was a sparse blank canvas I became worried that it wouldn't be the end product I'd imagined. The fireplace was partly to play as the tiles are a cream which I thought looked odd against the greyish tint of its surroundings. But I kept my faith and started to bring in objects to warm the room up. An old film poster I'd bought at an antiques fair, a record of my dads and an old guitar we'd had for years which is an orangey wood. These few things bought that needed colour, texture and life the room needed. 

See Part 2 for the finished article!