As I think I said in one of my earlier posts, I recently bought a house and moved in after about a month of painting and cleaning and updating. I love the results so far and am continuing to work on the house. I thought I would show you one before and after since I am pretty sure this room is completely done now.
This is my breakfast room as it looked when I moved in. It had old wallpaper that if you look really closely in the picture near the right of the back door, you can see that the wallpaper is stained well enough that you can see where pictures used to hang. Also, its not that I don't like wood paneling, but this house has a ton of it. And since the kitchen is right next to it and the kitchen cabinets are about the same color as the wood paneling, it makes the room look darker and more closed in. The house is 49 years old and so is most of the finishes in it, including the laminate floors in the kitchen. They weren't bad looking, but the seams were coming up.
Now here is the after of this room.
As you can see, I added hardwoods in the areas of the house that did not have any. I actually painted over the wallpaper because it was stuck on so well. It took quite a few coats of paint but it looks great! I painted all of the wood doors, paneling, and trim in a gloss white to lighten up the room and match the rest of the house trim work. The laundry room doors are still those louvered swinging doors but they are painted white (they were off the hinges in this picture). Which by the way I love my laundry room! It has the washer and dryer on the left as well as a space for a refrigerator, and on the right it has a folding area, desk, and space for my sewing machine and tons of storage all over! I did leave the laminate floors in there because you always want to have something durable in a laundry room since you never know when a washer or refrigerator might overflow or leak and that would be horrible if it ruined your floors. Getting back to the kitchen, I did leave the wood shelf so that some of the wood from the kitchen was continued into the breakfast room and didn't seem like the rooms were completely separate. My final touch in the room was to add roman shades. A kitchen already has so many hard surfaces that it is important to break up those surfaces with something soft. I chose roman shades because they are easy to maintain and can be pulled out of the way. The colors I chose in the roman shades include browns that are similar to the floors and the cabinets in the kitchen, and also incorporate a blue to pull it from the table that I have. You also may notice that my chairs don't match. I did that on purpose. They are all ladder back chairs but are different because I always have liked the look of different chairs at a table. It adds interest. I know its not for everyone but its what I like.
Here are a few examples of other tables with different styles of chairs:
Happy Designing!
-Brittany-
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