Our Home Tour: The Dining Room

Well, the dining room seemed like the next best place on the tour. Afterall, most of the changes over the last few months have been in this room. You might remember that we had a large rectangular table in here, with wood toned chairs with red cloth seats. The room also was a dark shade of sage green (BR: GrasshopperWing).

After getting completely fed up with having such a large table with no leg room for our guests, I bought this round table, which leaves out into 15' long. It's draped with a 108" burlap fringed tablecloth from Ballard Designs. I love this tablecloth - and will eventually buy a natural colored one for the summer months. The chairs are a great thrift store find, all 4 (very solid) chairs for just $25. I spent hours, neh, weeks gilding these chairs - and I fear I'm still not done.

The chandelier was purchased on eBay, an effort to match the fixtures that might have once been in the house. They're made from heavy "pot" metal, and then enameled with the color.

A full view of the dining room from the living room. Those windows look out onto the backyard garden, which is quite spectacular during most of the year. Right now - not so much. The matching sideboard to the once massive but useless table stayed under the original buffet window, and I left the matching chairs, too.

The dining seats are covered in a linen toile, and the side chairs are covered in a heavier cotton in a neutral oatmeal and gold stripe.

You might remember the post I did about the basket bar on the secretary. When I moved the secretary into the living room, I had to find a place for the bar, so the sideboard got the job.

The sideboard is beautifully appliqued and carved, and has some nice hand forged pulls and knobs. Probably about 50-years old, it's a copy of some more expensive sets of an earlier period, and are very popular in this area. Just about everyone has either had one, or still does.

The basket for the bar came from Christmas Tree Shop, a great bargain at just $5, and perfect for the cocktail selection I've got out. The ginger jar is one of my best, a true antique with a wooden lid. I love this jar, and I got a great deal on it because the value has been significantly reduced by a crack along the backside.

The brass candlesticks are huge, and HEAVY, and came from a Salvation Army in Texas for $8/each. The decanters are a collection, one a very nice and relatively expensive Pasabahce crystal from Turkey. The other glasses are cut crystal from Macy's. Behind it all, you see another painting from the Russia trip. This one a farm scene.

The dining room has a swinging door into the kitchen, and the walls on either side of the door are not the same width. So, one side of the door has a collection of my herbiers from Massachusetts, and the other a small rolling bar with some of my favorite accessories. Let's take a look a that one first ...

I got the mirror out of the trash, and yes, I'm proud of it! I'm not sure why they threw it out - perhaps they just got tired of the decor, but I knew it'd work perfectly at our house - so out it came. I layered it with both hanging and leaning art, a sort of signature of mine.

The hanging herbier is hung from jute on simple art screws. If you attempt this on your own - know that it does take time to get everything lined up perfectly - but it's oh so worth it! Because I hung one of our roe buck antlers above the other botanical set up - I figured having one on a brass tray here was a nice balance.



This little bar cabinet is something Scott bought at a tag sale in Texas before he came back to Niagara Falls for good. You see, he was still in the Air Force when we moved into the house - so he was back and forth from December to March, and in that span, I cleaned and painted, and he shopped. Somehow looking back, that doesn't seem so fair, does it?

Anyway, the cabinet isn't my favorite piece, but getting rid of it will be like asking Scott to chop off a foot. For some reason, he's really attached.

Atop the cabinet, my paternal grandfather, for whom I am named after, left his WWII Army Bible to me, and I have done my best to take great care of it. It's the beautiful base of an antique brass cricket box filled with wine corks. I know, I know - we look like alcoholics, don't we? We're not - I promise! My favorite orange roses, with some berried eucalyptus in a simple square glass vase warm up the vignette.

I bought the stone altar from Wisteria outlet when I was in Texas in September. It has a chip in the bottom left corner that is hardly noticeable seeing as how the whole thing is chipped, so it was a whopping $35. Much less than the $179 retail price! A brass tray filled with wooden beads and a brass bird bell complete the top, with not an inch of space to put a glass of wine. But hey, that's what the table is for! LOL!

On the opposite side, a full collection of the herbiers. These are all the same collection, pressed in 1981, on the same day I was born a year later, in the town Scott grew up in. Now, how cool is that?

I got the roe buck antlers on our spring trip to Brimfield. They were $15/each!!

The rug is seagrass, banded in warm chocolate brown. A nice texture, and easy to clean. I opted not to layer other rugs on this seagrass, since there were so many other layered rugs in the house. The drapes are super long, silk taffeta in chocolate, something Scott wasn't too happy about hearing the cost of - but you can't have a room built on all low-dollar items. You gotta have the highs and the lows ... at least, that's my excuse for spending WAY TOO MUCH!

The sconces are not a match to the chandelier, but are very close, and are of the same period made from the same metal and painted in the same style. Of course, the pillows on the side chairs, meant to mimic the very expensive velvet and Flemish tapestry pillows, are made from my favorite velvet from Calico Corners (Velluto) in Espresso, and the same linen used on the chair seats.

The rooms in our house are set up in an enfilade style. Here you can see that the dining room opens directly onto the living room, and the living room directly onto the sunroom and foyer. It makes for wonderful flow and makes what is otherwise a small house, feel much larger.

When it came time to make decisions for the table dressing for the photoshoot, I thought about setting an elaborate table setting, but after chatting with Scott and a few friends, decided that something more casual would be a better fit. That's when I decided to use this basket (which I painted gray from it's original brassy colored wicker) and stacked with our ironstone, and silverware.

Red apples and autumn colored flowers finished out the grouping. I had also purchased green apples and spring flowers for the vignette, in the event that they wanted to have a lighter, spring time look, but this one won them over.

And there you have it - the CDLV dining room. I hope you like it, and by all means, stop by anytime for a bite to eat and a glass of wine!